Do jornal Le Monde, desta sexta-feira 31 de março de 2006, em tradução de relatório de procuradoria dos EUA:
Neste link.
Comment j'ai préparé le 11-Septembre
LE MONDE | 31.03.06 | 12h11 • Mis à jour le 31.03.06 | 12h11
Les paragraphes ont été numérotés par le greffe du tribunal
6. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed a fourni des informations sur la mise au point de son projet de détournement d'avions aux Etats-Unis par des kamikazes. Au cours de l'année 1994, Ramzi Youssef, Oussama Asmurai alias Wali Khan, Abdul Hakim Mourad et lui-même ont travaillé sur le "projet Bojinka", qui consistait à faire exploser en vol 12 appareils de compagnies américaines en provenance ou à destination des Etats-Unis. Ce projet fut déjoué au début de 1995.
Khaled Cheikh Mohammed se rendit en Afghanistan en 1996 afin de convaincre Ben Laden de lui donner de l'argent et des hommes dans le but de détourner dix avions aux Etats-Unis et de les précipiter sur des objectifs civils et militaires, cinq sur la Côte ouest et cinq sur la Côte est. Au début, Ben Laden émit des doutes sur la faisabilité de l'opération, mais, en mars ou avril 1999, il changea d'avis et convoqua Khaled Cheikh Mohammed à Kandahar, en Afghanistan. Ben Laden déclara à Khaled Cheikh Mohammed qu'il estimait à présent le projet réalisable et l'informa que l'opération bénéficiait désormais du soutien total d'Al-Qaida. Ben Laden lui proposa aussitôt quatre personnes prêtes à assumer une opération suicide : Walid Mohammed Saleh Ba'Attash (alias"Khallad"), Abou Bara Al-Yamani, Khaled Al-Mihdhar (ou "Midhdar") et Nawaf Al-Hazmi. Une fois que le projet de détournement eut obtenu l'approbation de Ben Laden, Khaled Cheikh Mohammed et d'autres cadres importants d'Al-Qaida qui en étaient informés y firent référence sous le terme d'"opération des avions". Khaled Cheikh Mohammed estima qu'il faudrait environ deux ans pour mettre au point le projet et l'exécuter.
7. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed dut procéder au premier ajustement majeur de son plan au cours du printemps et de l'été 1999, lorsqu'il réalisa que Ba'Attash (alias"Khallad") et Abou Bara, tous deux yéménites, ne pourraient obtenir de visas américains. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed voulait que ces deux exécutants participent à l'opération, comme d'autres Yéménites appartenant à la garde rapprochée de Ben Laden, dont Al-Battar Al-Yemeni. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed se résolut donc à scinder l'opération en deux parties distinctes afin de s'assurer de la participation des Yéménites. La première partie concernait les Etats-Unis. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed décida d'envoyer un nombre indéterminé d'exécutants aux Etats-Unis afin d'y détourner des appareils de lignes américains et de les précipiter contre des objectifs situés aux Etats-Unis.
Dès le milieu de l'année 1999, Al-Mihdhar et Al-Hazmi, qui possédaient déjà des visas américains, avaient été désignés pour participer à l'opération. La seconde partie de l'opération, conçue comme une version restreinte du projet Bojinka, mettrait en jeu des Yéménites : des kamikazes détourneraient des appareils de compagnies américaines assurant des liaisons transpacifiques et les feraient exploser en vol au lieu de les diriger contre des objectifs au sol. Au milieu de l'année 1999, Ba'Attash et Abou Bara avaient été désignés comme devant participer à ce volet de l'opération… En tout état de cause, le projet à ce stade était de faire exploser en vol ou de précipiter sur des objectifs au sol à peu près au même moment les avions détournés au-dessus des Etats-Unis et du Sud-Est asiatique afin de maximiser l'impact psychologique des attaques.
Vers les mois d'avril ou mai 2000, Ben Laden annula la partie asiatique de l'opération en affirmant qu'il serait trop difficile de synchroniser les volets américain et asiatique du plan.
14. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed déclare qu'il fut heureux que Ben Laden lui confie la responsabilité de l'opération du 11-Septembre car lui-même avait proposé une opération semblable à Ben Laden quatre ans plus tôt, en 1996, juste après l'arrivée de celui-ci à Tora Bora après son départ du Soudan. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed pensait que l'opération serait aisée. C'est à ce moment-là qu'il suggéra que les moudjahidins prennent des cours de pilotage afin d'être en mesure de détourner de gros appareils, des Boeing 707-400 ou des avions plus gros, et non pas des petits avions. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed ne voulait pas limiter l'entraînement militaire à celui dispensé en Afghanistan parce qu'il ne le considérait pas suffisamment adapté. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed estimait que la simplicité était la clé du succès. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed n'aimait pas recourir à des codes dans les messages ou courriels de routine. Il demanda à ses exécutants d'avoir un comportement le plus normal possible, de s'en tenir dans leurs lettres à un ton éducatif, social ou commercial, et de ne passer que de brefs appels téléphoniques. Il délégua à Atta une autorité suffisante pour que celui-ci limite au maximum ses contacts avec lui-même et d'autres responsables d'Al-Qaida, et qu'il puisse prendre les décisions nécessaires. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed interdit à ses exécutants de contacter le Pakistan pour quelque raison que ce fût. On alla même jusqu'à sup primer de leurs passeports tout tampon ou visa pakistanais. Atta avait suivi une formation dans ce domaine et maîtrisait la technique.
15. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed a déclaré que l'objectif des attentats contre les Tours jumelles était de "réveiller le peuple américain". Khaled Cheikh Mohammed explique que, si la cible avait été purement militaire ou gouvernementale, le peuple américain n'aurait pas pris conscience des atrocités que l'Amérique commet en soutenant Israël contre le peuple palestinien, ni du caractère égoïste de la politique étrangère américaine qui corrompt les gouvernements arabes et accentue l'exploitation des peuples arabes et musulmans.
17. [En 1998], lors de la première réunion entre Ben Laden et Khaled Cheikh Mohammed consacrée à la sélection des objectifs, les deux hommes n'évoquèrent les concepts opérationnels qu'en termes généraux. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed croit se souvenir qu'Abou Hafs assistait à cette réunion. Ben Laden exprima son souhait de frapper simultanément le Pentagone, la Maison Blanche et le bâtiment du Capitole, et ajouta qu'il avait songé à Nawaf Al-Hazmi et Khaled Al-Midhdhar pour l'opération. Il espérait que Khaled Cheikh Mohammed serait en mesure de proposer d'autres pilotes originaires de la région du Golfe persique grâce aux relations qu'il y entretenait. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed précisa qu'à ce stade, le groupe de Mohammed Atta n'avait pas encore été désigné.
18. D'après Khaled Cheikh Mohammed, une fois qu'Atta eut été désigné comme un des futurs exécutants, Ben Laden organisa une nouvelle réunion à Kandahar pour déterminer quels objectifs seraient frappés. Ben Laden, Atta, Abou Hafs et Khaled Cheikh Mohammed étaient présents. Ce dernier explique qu'à ce moment-là, Hani Hanjour, le quatrième pilote, n'avait pas encore été désigné. Le groupe travailla donc dans l'idée que trois objectifs seulement seraient visés, et Ben Laden indiqua qu'il souhaitait frapper une cible militaire, une cible politique et une cible économique. Grâce à sa collaboration avec Ramzi Youssef au début des années 1990, Khaled Cheikh Mohammed avait à l'esprit de nombreux objectifs possibles, de sorte qu'au cours de cette réunion, on évoqua des dizaines de cibles éventuelles, dont le World Trade Center (WTC), une centrale nucléaire, l'Empire State Building, une ambassade étrangère à Washington et les sièges de la CIA et du FBI. Bien que le groupe estimât qu'il serait également intéressant de frapper un lieu rassemblant une forte population juive, aucun objectif précis ne fut évoqué. D'une manière générale, Khaled Cheikh Mohammed déclare qu'ils considéraient les grands immeubles américains comme étant particulièrement vulnérables à une attaque et faciles à frapper.
19. Avant que Khaled Cheikh Mohammed quitte l'Afghanistan, Ben Laden lui présenta une liste d'objectifs que Khaled Cheikh Mohammed transmit ensuite à Atta. Celui-ci dressa alors une liste de cibles préliminaires. Ben Laden informa Atta qu'il devait frapper les deux tours du WTC, le Pentagone et l'immeuble du Capitole, mais laissa à Atta le soin de choisir parmi d'autres cibles additionnelles, dont la Maison Blanche, la tour Sears [à Chicago] et une ambassade étrangère à Washington. A la suite de cette conversation, Atta utilisa un programme informatique pour localiser une centrale nucléaire en Pennsylvanie, que Ben Laden accepta d'ajouter à la liste.
39. Les détails de l'opération du 11-Septembre ont été strictement compartimentés, et seuls Khaled Cheikh Mohammed, Ben Laden, Mohammed Atef ainsi que certains membres des futurs commandos étaient au courant des objectifs précis, du calendrier, de l'identité des exécutants et du mode opératoire des attaques. De nombreux hauts responsables et simples cadres d'Al-Qaida savaient que Khaled Cheikh Mohammed préparait le départ d'exécutants pour les Etats-Unis, ce qui permit à certains de comprendre qu'Al-Qaida planifiait une attaque à court terme sur le territoire des Etats-Unis, mais aucun ne connaissait les objectifs précis ni la méthode prévue pour l'attaque. Pour s'être particulièrement intéressé à l'entraînement et aux déplacements des exécutants, Sayf Al-Adl aurait été le plus à même d'apprendre certains détails du projet, mais il ne reçut aucune information avant l'opération.
41. A un certain stade de l'entraînement d'Atta, Ben Laden décida qu'il serait l'"émir" des kamikazes aux Etats-Unis, avec Al-Hazmi comme adjoint. Ben Laden et Abou Hafs avaient au départ songé à désigner Ramzi Ben Al-Shibh comme"émir", car il avait dirigé la "cellule allemande" lorsque celle-ci était arrivée en Afghanistan, et aussi parce que Ben Al-Shibh paraissait posséder des talents de meneur et qu'il entretenait des liens avec des organisations islamiques non identifiées au Moyen-Orient et/ou en Europe. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed affirme qu'il n'a joué aucun rôle dans la désignation d'Atta comme"émir". Khaled Cheikh Mohammed a gardé d'Atta le souvenir d'un agent de valeur. Atta s'était beaucoup familiarisé avec l'Occident, il travaillait dur et apprenait vite. (…)
51. Aucun autre membre d'Al-Qaida ne participa à la décision d'utiliser des avions pour attaquer les Etats-Unis ni à la sélection initiale des objectifs. Toutes les autres personnes concernées ne furent mises au courant du projet, de façon plus ou moins détaillée, que lorsqu'elles furent personnellement impliquées dans le complot. Ainsi les pilotes n'apprirent les détails des attaques prévues qu'après avoir donné leur accord pour y participer.
52. En dehors des pilotes, aucun des hommes sélectionnés pour l'opération ne fut directement informé de la méthode d'attaque ni des objectifs visés.
53. La décision finale de frapper telle cible avec tel avion fut laissée aux pilotes. C'est lors d'une rencontre en Espagne en juillet 2001 qu'Atta informa Ben Al-Shibh des cibles choisies, après quoi Ben Al-Shibh transmit l'information à Khaled Cheikh Mohammed. La répartition finale des cibles entre les pilotes fut opérée par Atta, Shehhi, Hanjour, Jarrah et Hazmi.
54. C'est également par Ben Al-Shibh que Khaled Cheikh Mohammed apprit qu'Atta avait achevé à la fin août 2001 la sélection des objectifs et procédé à leur répartition entre les pilotes. Et ce n'est qu'à ce moment-là que les autres membres des commandos furent informés des objectifs et du plan opérationnel d'ensemble. C'est Ben Al-Shibh qui en informa Khaled Cheikh Mohammed.
63. A la fin août, lorsque les ultimes détails de l'opération eurent été fixés, Ben Laden annonça au conseil de la choura d'Al-Qaida qu'une attaque majeure contre des intérêts américains non précisés aurait lieu au cours des semaines suivantes, mais il s'abstint de fournir d'autres détails.
64. Durant l'été, Ben Laden proféra plusieurs remarques faisant vaguement allusion à une attaque imminente, ce qui suscita des rumeurs dans la communauté djihadiste mondiale. Ben Laden annonça à d'importants visiteurs qu'ils devaient s'attendre à une attaque prochaine contre les intérêts américains et, au cours d'un discours prononcé au camp Al-Faruq, demanda aux jeunes recrues de prier pour le succès d'une opération majeure impliquant vingt martyrs. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed et Abou Hafs s'inquiétèrent de ce manque de discrétion et pressèrent Ben Laden de ne plus évoquer publiquement l'opération.
65. A trois reprises, Khaled Cheikh Mohammed refusa de céder à l'insistance de Ben Laden qui le pressait de lancer l'opération plus tôt que prévu. La première fois intervint au printemps 2000, peu après l'arrivée d'Atta, des autres pilotes et de leurs comparses aux Etats-Unis… Au cours du printemps 2001, Ben Laden insista à nouveau à deux reprises auprès de Khaled Cheikh Mohammed pour avancer la date des attaques. Ben Laden voulait qu'elles aient lieu le 12 mai 2001, soit sept mois exactement après l'attentat contre l'USS Cole au Yémen. La seconde fois intervint en juin ou juillet 2001, car Ben Laden avait appris par la presse que le premier ministre israélien Ariel Sharon devait se rendre à ce moment-là à la Maison Blanche. Mais dans les deux cas Khaled Cheikh Mohammed put résister aux pressions de Ben Laden en expliquant que son équipe n'était pas prête.
79. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed déclare que Moussaoui avait été recruté pour prendre part à une "seconde vague" d'attaques prévue à l'origine pour succéder à celles du 11-Septembre. Pour cette seconde vague d'attentats, il avait été prévu d'utiliser des exécutants d'origine européenne ou est-asiatique, car Khaled Cheikh Mohammed pensait qu'ils pourraient opérer plus facilement dans le contexte de mesures de sécurité dont il pensait qu'elles seraient renforcées après les attaques du 11-Septembre, en particulier en ce qui concernait les personnes originaires du Moyen-Orient. C'est pour cette raison que Khaled Cheikh Mohammed n'a utilisé que des individus originaires de cette région dans la première vague et réservait Moussaoui pour la seconde en raison de sa citoyenneté française. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed précise que la seconde vague n'était pas entièrement planifiée ni prête à être exécutée, mais qu'elle était"en veilleuse". Khaled Cheikh Mohammed n'imaginait pas que les conséquences de la première vague d'attaques seraient aussi catastrophiques qu'elles le furent et n'avait pas prévu que les Etats-Unis y réagiraient avec une telle virulence, de sorte que la phase suivante dut être mise en attente.
109. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed déclare que, d'un point de vue opérationnel, il n'est pas judicieux d'évoquer avec d'autres la tactique choisie ou les objectifs prévus : quand quatre personnes connaissent les détails d'une opération, c'est dangereux; quand deux personnes seulement les connaissent, c'est bien; quand une seule personne est au courant, c'est mieux. Khaled Cheikh Mohammed a donné comme exemple l'avantage opérationnel évident qu'a constitué le fait que Moussaoui ignorât l'objectif définitif de sa mission et l'identité des personnes qui devaient y participer.
Traduit de l'anglais par Gilles Berton
Parcours
1964 (ou 1965)
Naissance au Pakistan.
1983
Etudes de mécanique en Caroline du Nord, aux Etats-Unis.
1987-1993
Combat en Afghanistan et en Bosnie.
1999
Rejoint Al-Qaida, prépare les attentats du 11 septembre 2001.
Mars 2003
Capturé à Rawalpindi, remis aux Américains par les autorités pakistanaises, détenu depuis dans un lieu secret.
Este é um blog "dependente" ou "assistente" de meu blog principal (diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/), que sucedeu a varios outros (ver os links em Blogs PRA), no qual pretendo "depositar" textos diversos, cuja inserção naquele blog resultaria num peso adicional ou num estorvo à leitura. Considere-se, portanto, como frequentando um sebo ou uma "biblioteca", por certo mal arrumada e mesmo caótica, mas ainda assim um repositório de escritos esparsos.
sexta-feira, março 31, 2006
segunda-feira, março 13, 2006
59) A supremacia nuclear dos EUA
The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy
By Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press
From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006
Summary: For four decades, relations among the major nuclear powers have been shaped by their common vulnerability, a condition known as mutual assured destruction. But with the U.S. arsenal growing rapidly while Russia's decays and China's stays small, the era of MAD is ending -- and the era of U.S. nuclear primacy has begun.
Keir A. Lieber, the author of War and the Engineers: The Primacy of Politics Over Technology, is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Daryl G. Press, the author of Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats, is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
PRESENT AT THE DESTRUCTION
For almost half a century, the world's most powerful nuclear states have been locked in a military stalemate known as mutual assured destruction (MAD). By the early 1960s, the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union had grown so large and sophisticated that neither country could entirely destroy the other's retaliatory force by launching first, even with a surprise attack. Starting a nuclear war was therefore tantamount to committing suicide.
During the Cold War, many scholars and policy analysts believed that MAD made the world relatively stable and peaceful because it induced great caution in international politics, discouraged the use of nuclear threats to resolve disputes, and generally restrained the superpowers' behavior. (Revealingly, the last intense nuclear standoff, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, occurred at the dawn of the era of MAD.) Because of the nuclear stalemate, the optimists argued, the era of intentional great-power wars had ended. Critics of MAD, however, argued that it prevented not great-power war but the rolling back of the power and influence of a dangerously expansionist and totalitarian Soviet Union. From that perspective, MAD prolonged the life of an evil empire.
This debate may now seem like ancient history, but it is actually more relevant than ever -- because the age of MAD is nearing an end. Today, for the first time in almost 50 years, the United States stands on the verge of attaining nuclear primacy. It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike. This dramatic shift in the nuclear balance of power stems from a series of improvements in the United States' nuclear systems, the precipitous decline of Russia's arsenal, and the glacial pace of modernization of China's nuclear forces. Unless Washington's policies change or Moscow and Beijing take steps to increase the size and readiness of their forces, Russia and China -- and the rest of the world -- will live in the shadow of U.S. nuclear primacy for many years to come.
One's views on the implications of this change will depend on one's theoretical perspective. Hawks, who believe that the United States is a benevolent force in the world, will welcome the new nuclear era because they trust that U.S. dominance in both conventional and nuclear weapons will help deter aggression by other countries. For example, as U.S. nuclear primacy grows, China's leaders may act more cautiously on issues such as Taiwan, realizing that their vulnerable nuclear forces will not deter U.S. intervention -- and that Chinese nuclear threats could invite a U.S. strike on Beijing's arsenal. But doves, who oppose using nuclear threats to coerce other states and fear an emboldened and unconstrained United States, will worry. Nuclear primacy might lure Washington into more aggressive behavior, they argue, especially when combined with U.S. dominance in so many other dimensions of national power. Finally, a third group -- owls, who worry about the possibility of inadvertent conflict -- will fret that U.S. nuclear primacy could prompt other nuclear powers to adopt strategic postures, such as by giving control of nuclear weapons to lower-level commanders, that would make an unauthorized nuclear strike more likely -- thereby creating what strategic theorists call "crisis instability."
ARSENAL OF A DEMOCRACY
For 50 years, the Pentagon's war planners have structured the U.S. nuclear arsenal according to the goal of deterring a nuclear attack on the United States and, if necessary, winning a nuclear war by launching a preemptive strike that would destroy an enemy's nuclear forces. For these purposes, the United States relies on a nuclear triad comprising strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and ballistic-missile-launching submarines (known as SSBNs). The triad reduces the odds that an enemy could destroy all U.S. nuclear forces in a single strike, even in a surprise attack, ensuring that the United States would be able to launch a devastating response. Such retaliation would only have to be able to destroy a large enough portion of the attacker's cities and industry to deter an attack in the first place. The same nuclear triad, however, could be used in an offensive attack against an adversary's nuclear forces. Stealth bombers might slip past enemy radar, submarines could fire their missiles from near the enemy's shore and so give the enemy's leaders almost no time to respond, and highly accurate land-based missiles could destroy even hardened silos that have been reinforced against attack and other targets that require a direct hit. The ability to destroy all of an adversary's nuclear forces, eliminating the possibility of a retaliatory strike, is known as a first-strike capability, or nuclear primacy.
The United States derived immense strategic benefits from its nuclear primacy during the early years of the Cold War, in terms of both crisis-bargaining advantages vis-à-vis the Soviet Union (for example, in the case of Berlin in the late 1950s and early 1960s) and planning for war against the Red Army in Europe. If the Soviets had invaded Western Europe in the 1950s, the United States intended to win World War III by immediately launching a massive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, its Eastern European clients, and its Chinese ally. These plans were not the concoctions of midlevel Pentagon bureaucrats; they were approved by the highest level of the U.S. government.
U.S. nuclear primacy waned in the early 1960s, as the Soviets developed the capability to carry out a retaliatory second strike. With this development came the onset of MAD. Washington abandoned its strategy of a preemptive nuclear strike, but for the remainder of the Cold War, it struggled to escape MAD and reestablish its nuclear dominance. It expanded its nuclear arsenal, continuously improved the accuracy and the lethality of its weapons aimed at Soviet nuclear arms, targeted Soviet command-and-control systems, invested in missile-defense shields, sent attack submarines to trail Soviet SSBNs, and built increasingly accurate multiwarhead land- and submarine-launched ballistic missiles as well as stealth bombers and stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles. Equally unhappy with MAD, the Soviet Union also built a massive arsenal in the hope of gaining nuclear superiority. Neither side came close to gaining a first-strike capability, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the arms race as entirely irrational: both superpowers were well aware of the benefits of nuclear primacy, and neither was willing to risk falling behind.
Since the Cold War's end, the U.S. nuclear arsenal has significantly improved. The United States has replaced the ballistic missiles on its submarines with the substantially more accurate Trident II D-5 missiles, many of which carry new, larger-yield warheads. The U.S. Navy has shifted a greater proportion of its SSBNs to the Pacific so that they can patrol near the Chinese coast or in the blind spot of Russia's early warning radar network. The U.S. Air Force has finished equipping its B-52 bombers with nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which are probably invisible to Russian and Chinese air-defense radar. And the air force has also enhanced the avionics on its B-2 stealth bombers to permit them to fly at extremely low altitudes in order to avoid even the most sophisticated radar. Finally, although the air force finished dismantling its highly lethal MX missiles in 2005 to comply with arms control agreements, it is significantly improving its remaining ICBMs by installing the MX's high-yield warheads and advanced reentry vehicles on Minuteman ICBMs, and it has upgraded the Minuteman's guidance systems to match the MX's accuracy.
IMBALANCE OF TERROR
Even as the United States' nuclear forces have grown stronger since the end of the Cold War, Russia's strategic nuclear arsenal has sharply deteriorated. Russia has 39 percent fewer long-range bombers, 58 percent fewer ICBMs, and 80 percent fewer SSBNs than the Soviet Union fielded during its last days. The true extent of the Russian arsenal's decay, however, is much greater than these cuts suggest. What nuclear forces Russia retains are hardly ready for use. Russia's strategic bombers, now located at only two bases and thus vulnerable to a surprise attack, rarely conduct training exercises, and their warheads are stored off-base. Over 80 percent of Russia's silo-based ICBMs have exceeded their original service lives, and plans to replace them with new missiles have been stymied by failed tests and low rates of production. Russia's mobile ICBMs rarely patrol, and although they could fire their missiles from inside their bases if given sufficient warning of an attack, it appears unlikely that they would have the time to do so.
The third leg of Russia's nuclear triad has weakened the most. Since 2000, Russia's SSBNs have conducted approximately two patrols per year, down from 60 in 1990. (By contrast, the U.S. SSBN patrol rate today is about 40 per year.) Most of the time, all nine of Russia's ballistic missile submarines are sitting in port, where they make easy targets. Moreover, submarines require well-trained crews to be effective. Operating a ballistic missile submarine -- and silently coordinating its operations with surface ships and attack submarines to evade an enemy's forces -- is not simple. Without frequent patrols, the skills of Russian submariners, like the submarines themselves, are decaying. Revealingly, a 2004 test (attended by President Vladimir Putin) of several submarine-launched ballistic missiles was a total fiasco: all either failed to launch or veered off course. The fact that there were similar failures in the summer and fall of 2005 completes this unflattering picture of Russia's nuclear forces.
Compounding these problems, Russia's early warning system is a mess. Neither Soviet nor Russian satellites have ever been capable of reliably detecting missiles launched from U.S. submarines. (In a recent public statement, a top Russian general described his country's early warning satellite constellation as "hopelessly outdated.") Russian commanders instead rely on ground-based radar systems to detect incoming warheads from submarine-launched missiles. But the radar network has a gaping hole in its coverage that lies to the east of the country, toward the Pacific Ocean. If U.S. submarines were to fire missiles from areas in the Pacific, Russian leaders probably would not know of the attack until the warheads detonated. Russia's radar coverage of some areas in the North Atlantic is also spotty, providing only a few minutes of warning before the impact of submarine-launched warheads.
Moscow could try to reduce its vulnerability by finding the money to keep its submarines and mobile missiles dispersed. But that would be only a short-term fix. Russia has already extended the service life of its aging mobile ICBMs, something that it cannot do indefinitely, and its efforts to deploy new strategic weapons continue to flounder. The Russian navy's plan to launch a new class of ballistic missile submarines has fallen far behind schedule. It is now highly likely that not a single new submarine will be operational before 2008, and it is likely that none will be deployed until later.
Even as Russia's nuclear forces deteriorate, the United States is improving its ability to track submarines and mobile missiles, further eroding Russian military leaders' confidence in Russia's nuclear deterrent. (As early as 1998, these leaders publicly expressed doubts about the ability of Russia's ballistic missile submarines to evade U.S. detection.) Moreover, Moscow has announced plans to reduce its land-based ICBM force by another 35 percent by 2010; outside experts predict that the actual cuts will slice 50 to 75 percent off the current force, possibly leaving Russia with as few as 150 ICBMs by the end of the decade, down from its 1990 level of almost 1,300 missiles. The more Russia's nuclear arsenal shrinks, the easier it will become for the United States to carry out a first strike.
To determine how much the nuclear balance has changed since the Cold War, we ran a computer model of a hypothetical U.S. attack on Russia's nuclear arsenal using the standard unclassified formulas that defense analysts have used for decades. We assigned U.S. nuclear warheads to Russian targets on the basis of two criteria: the most accurate weapons were aimed at the hardest targets, and the fastest-arriving weapons at the Russian forces that can react most quickly. Because Russia is essentially blind to a submarine attack from the Pacific and would have great difficulty detecting the approach of low-flying stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles, we targeted each Russian weapon system with at least one submarine-based warhead or cruise missile. An attack organized in this manner would give Russian leaders virtually no warning.
This simple plan is presumably less effective than Washington's actual strategy, which the U.S. government has spent decades perfecting. The real U.S. war plan may call for first targeting Russia's command and control, sabotaging Russia's radar stations, or taking other preemptive measures -- all of which would make the actual U.S. force far more lethal than our model assumes.
According to our model, such a simplified surprise attack would have a good chance of destroying every Russian bomber base, submarine, and ICBM. [See Footnote #1] This finding is not based on best-case assumptions or an unrealistic scenario in which U.S. missiles perform perfectly and the warheads hit their targets without fail. Rather, we used standard assumptions to estimate the likely inaccuracy and unreliability of U.S. weapons systems. Moreover, our model indicates that all of Russia's strategic nuclear arsenal would still be destroyed even if U.S. weapons were 20 percent less accurate than we assumed, or if U.S. weapons were only 70 percent reliable, or if Russian ICBM silos were 50 percent "harder" (more reinforced, and hence more resistant to attack) than we expected. (Of course, the unclassified estimates we used may understate the capabilities of U.S. forces, making an attack even more likely to succeed.)
To be clear, this does not mean that a first strike by the United States would be guaranteed to work in reality; such an attack would entail many uncertainties. Nor, of course, does it mean that such a first strike is likely. But what our analysis suggests is profound: Russia's leaders can no longer count on a survivable nuclear deterrent. And unless they reverse course rapidly, Russia's vulnerability will only increase over time.
China's nuclear arsenal is even more vulnerable to a U.S. attack. A U.S. first strike could succeed whether it was launched as a surprise or in the midst of a crisis during a Chinese alert. China has a limited strategic nuclear arsenal. The People's Liberation Army currently possesses no modern SSBNs or long-range bombers. Its naval arm used to have two ballistic missile submarines, but one sank, and the other, which had such poor capabilities that it never left Chinese waters, is no longer operational. China's medium-range bomber force is similarly unimpressive: the bombers are obsolete and vulnerable to attack. According to unclassified U.S. government assessments, China's entire intercontinental nuclear arsenal consists of 18 stationary single-warhead ICBMs. These are not ready to launch on warning: their warheads are kept in storage and the missiles themselves are unfueled. (China's ICBMs use liquid fuel, which corrodes the missiles after 24 hours. Fueling them is estimated to take two hours.) The lack of an advanced early warning system adds to the vulnerability of the ICBMs. It appears that China would have no warning at all of a U.S. submarine-launched missile attack or a strike using hundreds of stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles.
Many sources claim that China is attempting to reduce the vulnerability of its ICBMs by building decoy silos. But decoys cannot provide a firm basis for deterrence. It would take close to a thousand fake silos to make a U.S. first strike on China as difficult as an attack on Russia, and no available information on China's nuclear forces suggests the existence of massive fields of decoys. And even if China built them, its commanders would always wonder whether U.S. sensors could distinguish real silos from fake ones.
Despite much talk about China's military modernization, the odds that Beijing will acquire a survivable nuclear deterrent in the next decade are slim. China's modernization efforts have focused on conventional forces, and the country's progress on nuclear modernization has accordingly been slow. Since the mid-1980s, China has been trying to develop a new missile for its future ballistic missile submarine as well as mobile ICBMs (the DF-31 and longer-range DF-31A) to replace its current ICBM force. The U.S. Defense Department predicts that China may deploy DF-31s in a few years, although the forecast should be treated skeptically: U.S. intelligence has been announcing the missile's imminent deployment for decades.
Even when they are eventually fielded, the DF-31s are unlikely to significantly reduce China's vulnerability. The missiles' limited range, estimated to be only 8,000 kilometers (4,970 miles), greatly restricts the area in which they can be hidden, reducing the difficulty of searching for them. The DF-31s could hit the contiguous United States only if they were deployed in China's far northeastern corner, principally in Heilongjiang Province, near the Russian-North Korean border. But Heilongjiang is mountainous, and so the missiles might be deployable only along a few hundred kilometers of good road or in a small plain in the center of the province. Such restrictions increase the missiles' vulnerability and raise questions about whether they are even intended to target the U.S. homeland or whether they will be aimed at targets in Russia and Asia.
Given the history of China's slow-motion nuclear modernization, it is doubtful that a Chinese second-strike force will materialize anytime soon. The United States has a first-strike capability against China today and should be able to maintain it for a decade or more.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN?
Is the United States intentionally pursuing nuclear primacy? Or is primacy an unintended byproduct of intra-Pentagon competition for budget share or of programs designed to counter new threats from terrorists and so-called rogue states? Motivations are always hard to pin down, but the weight of the evidence suggests that Washington is, in fact, deliberately seeking nuclear primacy. For one thing, U.S. leaders have always aspired to this goal. And the nature of the changes to the current arsenal and official rhetoric and policies support this conclusion.
The improvements to the U.S. nuclear arsenal offer evidence that the United States is actively seeking primacy. The navy, for example, is upgrading the fuse on the W-76 nuclear warhead, which sits atop most U.S. submarine-launched missiles. Currently, the warheads can be detonated only as air bursts well above ground, but the new fuse will also permit ground bursts (detonations at or very near ground level), which are ideal for attacking very hard targets such as ICBM silos. Another navy research program seeks to improve dramatically the accuracy of its submarine-launched missiles (already among the most accurate in the world). Even if these efforts fall short of their goals, any refinement in accuracy combined with the ground-burst fuses will multiply the missiles' lethality. Such improvements only make sense if the missiles are meant to destroy a large number of hard targets. And given that B-2s are already very stealthy aircraft, it is difficult to see how the air force could justify the increased risk of crashing them into the ground by having them fly at very low altitudes in order to avoid radar detection -- unless their mission is to penetrate a highly sophisticated air defense network such as Russia's or, perhaps in the future, China's.
During the Cold War, one explanation for the development of the nuclear arms race was that the rival military services' competition for budget share drove them to build ever more nuclear weapons. But the United States today is not achieving primacy by buying big-ticket platforms such as new SSBNs, bombers, or ICBMs. Current modernization programs involve incremental improvements to existing systems. The recycling of warheads and reentry vehicles from the air force's retired MX missiles (there are even reports that extra MX warheads may be put on navy submarine-launched missiles) is the sort of efficient use of resources that does not fit a theory based on parochial competition for increased funding. Rather than reflect organizational resource battles, these steps look like a coordinated set of programs to enhance the United States' nuclear first-strike capabilities.
Some may wonder whether U.S. nuclear modernization efforts are actually designed with terrorists or rogue states in mind. Given the United States' ongoing war on terror, and the continuing U.S. interest in destroying deeply buried bunkers (reflected in the Bush administration's efforts to develop new nuclear weapons to destroy underground targets), one might assume that the W-76 upgrades are designed to be used against targets such as rogue states' arsenals of weapons of mass destruction or terrorists holed up in caves. But this explanation does not add up. The United States already has more than a thousand nuclear warheads capable of attacking bunkers or caves. If the United States' nuclear modernization were really aimed at rogue states or terrorists, the country's nuclear force would not need the additional thousand ground-burst warheads it will gain from the W-76 modernization program. The current and future U.S. nuclear force, in other words, seems designed to carry out a preemptive disarming strike against Russia or China.
The intentional pursuit of nuclear primacy is, moreover, entirely consistent with the United States' declared policy of expanding its global dominance. The Bush administration's 2002 National Security Strategy explicitly states that the United States aims to establish military primacy: "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." To this end, the United States is openly seeking primacy in every dimension of modern military technology, both in its conventional arsenal and in its nuclear forces.
Washington's pursuit of nuclear primacy helps explain its missile-defense strategy, for example. Critics of missile defense argue that a national missile shield, such as the prototype the United States has deployed in Alaska and California, would be easily overwhelmed by a cloud of warheads and decoys launched by Russia or China. They are right: even a multilayered system with land-, air-, sea-, and space-based elements, is highly unlikely to protect the United States from a major nuclear attack. But they are wrong to conclude that such a missile-defense system is therefore worthless -- as are the supporters of missile defense who argue that, for similar reasons, such a system could be of concern only to rogue states and terrorists and not to other major nuclear powers.
What both of these camps overlook is that the sort of missile defenses that the United States might plausibly deploy would be valuable primarily in an offensive context, not a defensive one -- as an adjunct to a U.S. first-strike capability, not as a standalone shield. If the United States launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or China), the targeted country would be left with a tiny surviving arsenal -- if any at all. At that point, even a relatively modest or inefficient missile-defense system might well be enough to protect against any retaliatory strikes, because the devastated enemy would have so few warheads and decoys left.
During the Cold War, Washington relied on its nuclear arsenal not only to deter nuclear strikes by its enemies but also to deter the Warsaw Pact from exploiting its conventional military superiority to attack Western Europe. It was primarily this latter mission that made Washington rule out promises of "no first use" of nuclear weapons. Now that such a mission is obsolete and the United States is beginning to regain nuclear primacy, however, Washington's continued refusal to eschew a first strike and the country's development of a limited missile-defense capability take on a new, and possibly more menacing, look. The most logical conclusions to make are that a nuclear-war-fighting capability remains a key component of the United States' military doctrine and that nuclear primacy remains a goal of the United States.
STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB?
During the Cold War, MAD rendered the debate about the wisdom of nuclear primacy little more than a theoretical exercise. Now that MAD and the awkward equilibrium it maintained are about to be upset, the argument has become deadly serious. Hawks will undoubtedly see the advent of U.S. nuclear primacy as a positive development. For them, MAD was regrettable because it left the United States vulnerable to nuclear attack. With the passing of MAD, they argue, Washington will have what strategists refer to as "escalation dominance" -- the ability to win a war at any level of violence -- and will thus be better positioned to check the ambitions of dangerous states such as China, North Korea, and Iran. Doves, on the other hand, are fearful of a world in which the United States feels free to threaten -- and perhaps even use -- force in pursuit of its foreign policy goals. In their view, nuclear weapons can produce peace and stability only when all nuclear powers are equally vulnerable. Owls worry that nuclear primacy will cause destabilizing reactions on the part of other governments regardless of the United States' intentions. They assume that Russia and China will work furiously to reduce their vulnerability by building more missiles, submarines, and bombers; putting more warheads on each weapon; keeping their nuclear forces on higher peacetime levels of alert; and adopting hair-trigger retaliatory policies. If Russia and China take these steps, owls argue, the risk of accidental, unauthorized, or even intentional nuclear war -- especially during moments of crisis -- may climb to levels not seen for decades.
Ultimately, the wisdom of pursuing nuclear primacy must be evaluated in the context of the United States' foreign policy goals. The United States is now seeking to maintain its global preeminence, which the Bush administration defines as the ability to stave off the emergence of a peer competitor and prevent weaker countries from being able to challenge the United States in critical regions such as the Persian Gulf. If Washington continues to believe such preeminence is necessary for its security, then the benefits of nuclear primacy might exceed the risks. But if the United States adopts a more restrained foreign policy -- for example, one premised on greater skepticism of the wisdom of forcibly exporting democracy, launching military strikes to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and aggressively checking rising challengers -- then the benefits of nuclear primacy will be trumped by the dangers.
[Footnote #1] We develop our argument further in "The End of MAD? The Nuclear Dimension of U.S. Primacy," International Security 30, no. 4 (Spring 2006).
By Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press
From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006
Summary: For four decades, relations among the major nuclear powers have been shaped by their common vulnerability, a condition known as mutual assured destruction. But with the U.S. arsenal growing rapidly while Russia's decays and China's stays small, the era of MAD is ending -- and the era of U.S. nuclear primacy has begun.
Keir A. Lieber, the author of War and the Engineers: The Primacy of Politics Over Technology, is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Daryl G. Press, the author of Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats, is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
PRESENT AT THE DESTRUCTION
For almost half a century, the world's most powerful nuclear states have been locked in a military stalemate known as mutual assured destruction (MAD). By the early 1960s, the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union had grown so large and sophisticated that neither country could entirely destroy the other's retaliatory force by launching first, even with a surprise attack. Starting a nuclear war was therefore tantamount to committing suicide.
During the Cold War, many scholars and policy analysts believed that MAD made the world relatively stable and peaceful because it induced great caution in international politics, discouraged the use of nuclear threats to resolve disputes, and generally restrained the superpowers' behavior. (Revealingly, the last intense nuclear standoff, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, occurred at the dawn of the era of MAD.) Because of the nuclear stalemate, the optimists argued, the era of intentional great-power wars had ended. Critics of MAD, however, argued that it prevented not great-power war but the rolling back of the power and influence of a dangerously expansionist and totalitarian Soviet Union. From that perspective, MAD prolonged the life of an evil empire.
This debate may now seem like ancient history, but it is actually more relevant than ever -- because the age of MAD is nearing an end. Today, for the first time in almost 50 years, the United States stands on the verge of attaining nuclear primacy. It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike. This dramatic shift in the nuclear balance of power stems from a series of improvements in the United States' nuclear systems, the precipitous decline of Russia's arsenal, and the glacial pace of modernization of China's nuclear forces. Unless Washington's policies change or Moscow and Beijing take steps to increase the size and readiness of their forces, Russia and China -- and the rest of the world -- will live in the shadow of U.S. nuclear primacy for many years to come.
One's views on the implications of this change will depend on one's theoretical perspective. Hawks, who believe that the United States is a benevolent force in the world, will welcome the new nuclear era because they trust that U.S. dominance in both conventional and nuclear weapons will help deter aggression by other countries. For example, as U.S. nuclear primacy grows, China's leaders may act more cautiously on issues such as Taiwan, realizing that their vulnerable nuclear forces will not deter U.S. intervention -- and that Chinese nuclear threats could invite a U.S. strike on Beijing's arsenal. But doves, who oppose using nuclear threats to coerce other states and fear an emboldened and unconstrained United States, will worry. Nuclear primacy might lure Washington into more aggressive behavior, they argue, especially when combined with U.S. dominance in so many other dimensions of national power. Finally, a third group -- owls, who worry about the possibility of inadvertent conflict -- will fret that U.S. nuclear primacy could prompt other nuclear powers to adopt strategic postures, such as by giving control of nuclear weapons to lower-level commanders, that would make an unauthorized nuclear strike more likely -- thereby creating what strategic theorists call "crisis instability."
ARSENAL OF A DEMOCRACY
For 50 years, the Pentagon's war planners have structured the U.S. nuclear arsenal according to the goal of deterring a nuclear attack on the United States and, if necessary, winning a nuclear war by launching a preemptive strike that would destroy an enemy's nuclear forces. For these purposes, the United States relies on a nuclear triad comprising strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and ballistic-missile-launching submarines (known as SSBNs). The triad reduces the odds that an enemy could destroy all U.S. nuclear forces in a single strike, even in a surprise attack, ensuring that the United States would be able to launch a devastating response. Such retaliation would only have to be able to destroy a large enough portion of the attacker's cities and industry to deter an attack in the first place. The same nuclear triad, however, could be used in an offensive attack against an adversary's nuclear forces. Stealth bombers might slip past enemy radar, submarines could fire their missiles from near the enemy's shore and so give the enemy's leaders almost no time to respond, and highly accurate land-based missiles could destroy even hardened silos that have been reinforced against attack and other targets that require a direct hit. The ability to destroy all of an adversary's nuclear forces, eliminating the possibility of a retaliatory strike, is known as a first-strike capability, or nuclear primacy.
The United States derived immense strategic benefits from its nuclear primacy during the early years of the Cold War, in terms of both crisis-bargaining advantages vis-à-vis the Soviet Union (for example, in the case of Berlin in the late 1950s and early 1960s) and planning for war against the Red Army in Europe. If the Soviets had invaded Western Europe in the 1950s, the United States intended to win World War III by immediately launching a massive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, its Eastern European clients, and its Chinese ally. These plans were not the concoctions of midlevel Pentagon bureaucrats; they were approved by the highest level of the U.S. government.
U.S. nuclear primacy waned in the early 1960s, as the Soviets developed the capability to carry out a retaliatory second strike. With this development came the onset of MAD. Washington abandoned its strategy of a preemptive nuclear strike, but for the remainder of the Cold War, it struggled to escape MAD and reestablish its nuclear dominance. It expanded its nuclear arsenal, continuously improved the accuracy and the lethality of its weapons aimed at Soviet nuclear arms, targeted Soviet command-and-control systems, invested in missile-defense shields, sent attack submarines to trail Soviet SSBNs, and built increasingly accurate multiwarhead land- and submarine-launched ballistic missiles as well as stealth bombers and stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles. Equally unhappy with MAD, the Soviet Union also built a massive arsenal in the hope of gaining nuclear superiority. Neither side came close to gaining a first-strike capability, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the arms race as entirely irrational: both superpowers were well aware of the benefits of nuclear primacy, and neither was willing to risk falling behind.
Since the Cold War's end, the U.S. nuclear arsenal has significantly improved. The United States has replaced the ballistic missiles on its submarines with the substantially more accurate Trident II D-5 missiles, many of which carry new, larger-yield warheads. The U.S. Navy has shifted a greater proportion of its SSBNs to the Pacific so that they can patrol near the Chinese coast or in the blind spot of Russia's early warning radar network. The U.S. Air Force has finished equipping its B-52 bombers with nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which are probably invisible to Russian and Chinese air-defense radar. And the air force has also enhanced the avionics on its B-2 stealth bombers to permit them to fly at extremely low altitudes in order to avoid even the most sophisticated radar. Finally, although the air force finished dismantling its highly lethal MX missiles in 2005 to comply with arms control agreements, it is significantly improving its remaining ICBMs by installing the MX's high-yield warheads and advanced reentry vehicles on Minuteman ICBMs, and it has upgraded the Minuteman's guidance systems to match the MX's accuracy.
IMBALANCE OF TERROR
Even as the United States' nuclear forces have grown stronger since the end of the Cold War, Russia's strategic nuclear arsenal has sharply deteriorated. Russia has 39 percent fewer long-range bombers, 58 percent fewer ICBMs, and 80 percent fewer SSBNs than the Soviet Union fielded during its last days. The true extent of the Russian arsenal's decay, however, is much greater than these cuts suggest. What nuclear forces Russia retains are hardly ready for use. Russia's strategic bombers, now located at only two bases and thus vulnerable to a surprise attack, rarely conduct training exercises, and their warheads are stored off-base. Over 80 percent of Russia's silo-based ICBMs have exceeded their original service lives, and plans to replace them with new missiles have been stymied by failed tests and low rates of production. Russia's mobile ICBMs rarely patrol, and although they could fire their missiles from inside their bases if given sufficient warning of an attack, it appears unlikely that they would have the time to do so.
The third leg of Russia's nuclear triad has weakened the most. Since 2000, Russia's SSBNs have conducted approximately two patrols per year, down from 60 in 1990. (By contrast, the U.S. SSBN patrol rate today is about 40 per year.) Most of the time, all nine of Russia's ballistic missile submarines are sitting in port, where they make easy targets. Moreover, submarines require well-trained crews to be effective. Operating a ballistic missile submarine -- and silently coordinating its operations with surface ships and attack submarines to evade an enemy's forces -- is not simple. Without frequent patrols, the skills of Russian submariners, like the submarines themselves, are decaying. Revealingly, a 2004 test (attended by President Vladimir Putin) of several submarine-launched ballistic missiles was a total fiasco: all either failed to launch or veered off course. The fact that there were similar failures in the summer and fall of 2005 completes this unflattering picture of Russia's nuclear forces.
Compounding these problems, Russia's early warning system is a mess. Neither Soviet nor Russian satellites have ever been capable of reliably detecting missiles launched from U.S. submarines. (In a recent public statement, a top Russian general described his country's early warning satellite constellation as "hopelessly outdated.") Russian commanders instead rely on ground-based radar systems to detect incoming warheads from submarine-launched missiles. But the radar network has a gaping hole in its coverage that lies to the east of the country, toward the Pacific Ocean. If U.S. submarines were to fire missiles from areas in the Pacific, Russian leaders probably would not know of the attack until the warheads detonated. Russia's radar coverage of some areas in the North Atlantic is also spotty, providing only a few minutes of warning before the impact of submarine-launched warheads.
Moscow could try to reduce its vulnerability by finding the money to keep its submarines and mobile missiles dispersed. But that would be only a short-term fix. Russia has already extended the service life of its aging mobile ICBMs, something that it cannot do indefinitely, and its efforts to deploy new strategic weapons continue to flounder. The Russian navy's plan to launch a new class of ballistic missile submarines has fallen far behind schedule. It is now highly likely that not a single new submarine will be operational before 2008, and it is likely that none will be deployed until later.
Even as Russia's nuclear forces deteriorate, the United States is improving its ability to track submarines and mobile missiles, further eroding Russian military leaders' confidence in Russia's nuclear deterrent. (As early as 1998, these leaders publicly expressed doubts about the ability of Russia's ballistic missile submarines to evade U.S. detection.) Moreover, Moscow has announced plans to reduce its land-based ICBM force by another 35 percent by 2010; outside experts predict that the actual cuts will slice 50 to 75 percent off the current force, possibly leaving Russia with as few as 150 ICBMs by the end of the decade, down from its 1990 level of almost 1,300 missiles. The more Russia's nuclear arsenal shrinks, the easier it will become for the United States to carry out a first strike.
To determine how much the nuclear balance has changed since the Cold War, we ran a computer model of a hypothetical U.S. attack on Russia's nuclear arsenal using the standard unclassified formulas that defense analysts have used for decades. We assigned U.S. nuclear warheads to Russian targets on the basis of two criteria: the most accurate weapons were aimed at the hardest targets, and the fastest-arriving weapons at the Russian forces that can react most quickly. Because Russia is essentially blind to a submarine attack from the Pacific and would have great difficulty detecting the approach of low-flying stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles, we targeted each Russian weapon system with at least one submarine-based warhead or cruise missile. An attack organized in this manner would give Russian leaders virtually no warning.
This simple plan is presumably less effective than Washington's actual strategy, which the U.S. government has spent decades perfecting. The real U.S. war plan may call for first targeting Russia's command and control, sabotaging Russia's radar stations, or taking other preemptive measures -- all of which would make the actual U.S. force far more lethal than our model assumes.
According to our model, such a simplified surprise attack would have a good chance of destroying every Russian bomber base, submarine, and ICBM. [See Footnote #1] This finding is not based on best-case assumptions or an unrealistic scenario in which U.S. missiles perform perfectly and the warheads hit their targets without fail. Rather, we used standard assumptions to estimate the likely inaccuracy and unreliability of U.S. weapons systems. Moreover, our model indicates that all of Russia's strategic nuclear arsenal would still be destroyed even if U.S. weapons were 20 percent less accurate than we assumed, or if U.S. weapons were only 70 percent reliable, or if Russian ICBM silos were 50 percent "harder" (more reinforced, and hence more resistant to attack) than we expected. (Of course, the unclassified estimates we used may understate the capabilities of U.S. forces, making an attack even more likely to succeed.)
To be clear, this does not mean that a first strike by the United States would be guaranteed to work in reality; such an attack would entail many uncertainties. Nor, of course, does it mean that such a first strike is likely. But what our analysis suggests is profound: Russia's leaders can no longer count on a survivable nuclear deterrent. And unless they reverse course rapidly, Russia's vulnerability will only increase over time.
China's nuclear arsenal is even more vulnerable to a U.S. attack. A U.S. first strike could succeed whether it was launched as a surprise or in the midst of a crisis during a Chinese alert. China has a limited strategic nuclear arsenal. The People's Liberation Army currently possesses no modern SSBNs or long-range bombers. Its naval arm used to have two ballistic missile submarines, but one sank, and the other, which had such poor capabilities that it never left Chinese waters, is no longer operational. China's medium-range bomber force is similarly unimpressive: the bombers are obsolete and vulnerable to attack. According to unclassified U.S. government assessments, China's entire intercontinental nuclear arsenal consists of 18 stationary single-warhead ICBMs. These are not ready to launch on warning: their warheads are kept in storage and the missiles themselves are unfueled. (China's ICBMs use liquid fuel, which corrodes the missiles after 24 hours. Fueling them is estimated to take two hours.) The lack of an advanced early warning system adds to the vulnerability of the ICBMs. It appears that China would have no warning at all of a U.S. submarine-launched missile attack or a strike using hundreds of stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles.
Many sources claim that China is attempting to reduce the vulnerability of its ICBMs by building decoy silos. But decoys cannot provide a firm basis for deterrence. It would take close to a thousand fake silos to make a U.S. first strike on China as difficult as an attack on Russia, and no available information on China's nuclear forces suggests the existence of massive fields of decoys. And even if China built them, its commanders would always wonder whether U.S. sensors could distinguish real silos from fake ones.
Despite much talk about China's military modernization, the odds that Beijing will acquire a survivable nuclear deterrent in the next decade are slim. China's modernization efforts have focused on conventional forces, and the country's progress on nuclear modernization has accordingly been slow. Since the mid-1980s, China has been trying to develop a new missile for its future ballistic missile submarine as well as mobile ICBMs (the DF-31 and longer-range DF-31A) to replace its current ICBM force. The U.S. Defense Department predicts that China may deploy DF-31s in a few years, although the forecast should be treated skeptically: U.S. intelligence has been announcing the missile's imminent deployment for decades.
Even when they are eventually fielded, the DF-31s are unlikely to significantly reduce China's vulnerability. The missiles' limited range, estimated to be only 8,000 kilometers (4,970 miles), greatly restricts the area in which they can be hidden, reducing the difficulty of searching for them. The DF-31s could hit the contiguous United States only if they were deployed in China's far northeastern corner, principally in Heilongjiang Province, near the Russian-North Korean border. But Heilongjiang is mountainous, and so the missiles might be deployable only along a few hundred kilometers of good road or in a small plain in the center of the province. Such restrictions increase the missiles' vulnerability and raise questions about whether they are even intended to target the U.S. homeland or whether they will be aimed at targets in Russia and Asia.
Given the history of China's slow-motion nuclear modernization, it is doubtful that a Chinese second-strike force will materialize anytime soon. The United States has a first-strike capability against China today and should be able to maintain it for a decade or more.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN?
Is the United States intentionally pursuing nuclear primacy? Or is primacy an unintended byproduct of intra-Pentagon competition for budget share or of programs designed to counter new threats from terrorists and so-called rogue states? Motivations are always hard to pin down, but the weight of the evidence suggests that Washington is, in fact, deliberately seeking nuclear primacy. For one thing, U.S. leaders have always aspired to this goal. And the nature of the changes to the current arsenal and official rhetoric and policies support this conclusion.
The improvements to the U.S. nuclear arsenal offer evidence that the United States is actively seeking primacy. The navy, for example, is upgrading the fuse on the W-76 nuclear warhead, which sits atop most U.S. submarine-launched missiles. Currently, the warheads can be detonated only as air bursts well above ground, but the new fuse will also permit ground bursts (detonations at or very near ground level), which are ideal for attacking very hard targets such as ICBM silos. Another navy research program seeks to improve dramatically the accuracy of its submarine-launched missiles (already among the most accurate in the world). Even if these efforts fall short of their goals, any refinement in accuracy combined with the ground-burst fuses will multiply the missiles' lethality. Such improvements only make sense if the missiles are meant to destroy a large number of hard targets. And given that B-2s are already very stealthy aircraft, it is difficult to see how the air force could justify the increased risk of crashing them into the ground by having them fly at very low altitudes in order to avoid radar detection -- unless their mission is to penetrate a highly sophisticated air defense network such as Russia's or, perhaps in the future, China's.
During the Cold War, one explanation for the development of the nuclear arms race was that the rival military services' competition for budget share drove them to build ever more nuclear weapons. But the United States today is not achieving primacy by buying big-ticket platforms such as new SSBNs, bombers, or ICBMs. Current modernization programs involve incremental improvements to existing systems. The recycling of warheads and reentry vehicles from the air force's retired MX missiles (there are even reports that extra MX warheads may be put on navy submarine-launched missiles) is the sort of efficient use of resources that does not fit a theory based on parochial competition for increased funding. Rather than reflect organizational resource battles, these steps look like a coordinated set of programs to enhance the United States' nuclear first-strike capabilities.
Some may wonder whether U.S. nuclear modernization efforts are actually designed with terrorists or rogue states in mind. Given the United States' ongoing war on terror, and the continuing U.S. interest in destroying deeply buried bunkers (reflected in the Bush administration's efforts to develop new nuclear weapons to destroy underground targets), one might assume that the W-76 upgrades are designed to be used against targets such as rogue states' arsenals of weapons of mass destruction or terrorists holed up in caves. But this explanation does not add up. The United States already has more than a thousand nuclear warheads capable of attacking bunkers or caves. If the United States' nuclear modernization were really aimed at rogue states or terrorists, the country's nuclear force would not need the additional thousand ground-burst warheads it will gain from the W-76 modernization program. The current and future U.S. nuclear force, in other words, seems designed to carry out a preemptive disarming strike against Russia or China.
The intentional pursuit of nuclear primacy is, moreover, entirely consistent with the United States' declared policy of expanding its global dominance. The Bush administration's 2002 National Security Strategy explicitly states that the United States aims to establish military primacy: "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." To this end, the United States is openly seeking primacy in every dimension of modern military technology, both in its conventional arsenal and in its nuclear forces.
Washington's pursuit of nuclear primacy helps explain its missile-defense strategy, for example. Critics of missile defense argue that a national missile shield, such as the prototype the United States has deployed in Alaska and California, would be easily overwhelmed by a cloud of warheads and decoys launched by Russia or China. They are right: even a multilayered system with land-, air-, sea-, and space-based elements, is highly unlikely to protect the United States from a major nuclear attack. But they are wrong to conclude that such a missile-defense system is therefore worthless -- as are the supporters of missile defense who argue that, for similar reasons, such a system could be of concern only to rogue states and terrorists and not to other major nuclear powers.
What both of these camps overlook is that the sort of missile defenses that the United States might plausibly deploy would be valuable primarily in an offensive context, not a defensive one -- as an adjunct to a U.S. first-strike capability, not as a standalone shield. If the United States launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or China), the targeted country would be left with a tiny surviving arsenal -- if any at all. At that point, even a relatively modest or inefficient missile-defense system might well be enough to protect against any retaliatory strikes, because the devastated enemy would have so few warheads and decoys left.
During the Cold War, Washington relied on its nuclear arsenal not only to deter nuclear strikes by its enemies but also to deter the Warsaw Pact from exploiting its conventional military superiority to attack Western Europe. It was primarily this latter mission that made Washington rule out promises of "no first use" of nuclear weapons. Now that such a mission is obsolete and the United States is beginning to regain nuclear primacy, however, Washington's continued refusal to eschew a first strike and the country's development of a limited missile-defense capability take on a new, and possibly more menacing, look. The most logical conclusions to make are that a nuclear-war-fighting capability remains a key component of the United States' military doctrine and that nuclear primacy remains a goal of the United States.
STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB?
During the Cold War, MAD rendered the debate about the wisdom of nuclear primacy little more than a theoretical exercise. Now that MAD and the awkward equilibrium it maintained are about to be upset, the argument has become deadly serious. Hawks will undoubtedly see the advent of U.S. nuclear primacy as a positive development. For them, MAD was regrettable because it left the United States vulnerable to nuclear attack. With the passing of MAD, they argue, Washington will have what strategists refer to as "escalation dominance" -- the ability to win a war at any level of violence -- and will thus be better positioned to check the ambitions of dangerous states such as China, North Korea, and Iran. Doves, on the other hand, are fearful of a world in which the United States feels free to threaten -- and perhaps even use -- force in pursuit of its foreign policy goals. In their view, nuclear weapons can produce peace and stability only when all nuclear powers are equally vulnerable. Owls worry that nuclear primacy will cause destabilizing reactions on the part of other governments regardless of the United States' intentions. They assume that Russia and China will work furiously to reduce their vulnerability by building more missiles, submarines, and bombers; putting more warheads on each weapon; keeping their nuclear forces on higher peacetime levels of alert; and adopting hair-trigger retaliatory policies. If Russia and China take these steps, owls argue, the risk of accidental, unauthorized, or even intentional nuclear war -- especially during moments of crisis -- may climb to levels not seen for decades.
Ultimately, the wisdom of pursuing nuclear primacy must be evaluated in the context of the United States' foreign policy goals. The United States is now seeking to maintain its global preeminence, which the Bush administration defines as the ability to stave off the emergence of a peer competitor and prevent weaker countries from being able to challenge the United States in critical regions such as the Persian Gulf. If Washington continues to believe such preeminence is necessary for its security, then the benefits of nuclear primacy might exceed the risks. But if the United States adopts a more restrained foreign policy -- for example, one premised on greater skepticism of the wisdom of forcibly exporting democracy, launching military strikes to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and aggressively checking rising challengers -- then the benefits of nuclear primacy will be trumped by the dangers.
[Footnote #1] We develop our argument further in "The End of MAD? The Nuclear Dimension of U.S. Primacy," International Security 30, no. 4 (Spring 2006).
58) OGMs a passo de lesma (isso quando anda "rápido")...
Burocracia emperrará novos transgênicos
Liberação de produtos pela CTNBio pode levar até quase dois anos, mostra estudo da Anvisa
Mauro Zanatta escreve para o “Valor Econômico”:
Passada a euforia com a aprovação da nova Lei de Biossegurança há um ano, as empresas de biotecnologia terão que enfrentar a dura realidade provocada pela burocracia da Comissão Técnica Nacional de Biossegurança (CTNBio).
Comemorada por defensores dos organismos geneticamente modificados como um importante instrumento para acelerar a liberação comercial de novos produtos, a lei acabou por consolidar prazos regimentais extremamente elásticos para a liberação dos transgênicos.
Um estudo inédito de especialistas da Agência Nacional de Vigilância Sanitária (Anvisa) e da Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR) mostra que o processo estabelecido pela Lei nº 11.105 pode demorar entre 290 dias (quase dez meses) e 590 dias (quase vinte meses) para ser aprovado pela CTNBio.
A estimativa de prazo não leva em conta a ordem dos processo na fila de quase 600 casos em andamento na CTNBio.
Remodelado pela nova lei, o colegiado responsável pela análise dos transgênicos ganhou diversas instâncias administrativas de recursos e apelações às suas decisões internas.
A mais emblemática é a adoção do questionamento sobre conflitos de interesses entre as decisões dos membros da comissão e suas ligações com a indústria biotecnológica.
Esse deve ser um dos mais utilizados e contestados instrumentos para emperrar os procedimentos de análise de novos casos pela CTNBio. "As empresas comemoraram a lei, mas não levaram em conta o novo ritual processual", avalia Letícia Rodrigues, gerente de Normatização e Avaliação da Anvisa e ex-representante do Ministério da Saúde no colegiado.
A especialista aponta outras "inovações" no processo como a realização de audiências públicas, exigências de licenciamento ambiental, avaliações de risco ambiental e aspectos sócio-econômicas, estudos sobre atividades com significativa degradação ambiental, diligências adicionais e consultas a especialistas, questionamentos sobre sigilo industrial e os recursos das partes interessadas, como ONGs e associações de produtores, por exemplo.
A nova lei também prevê apelações dos órgãos de registro e fiscalização dos ministérios da Agricultura, Meio Ambiente e Saúde, além da suspensão da tramitação do processo por 180 dias para novos estudos e esclarecimentos.
"E pode ainda haver a avocação do conselho de ministros para tratar de casos especiais", diz Victor Pelaez, professor do Departamento de Economia da UFPR.
O levantamento fará parte de um projeto de "coexistência" entre culturas transgênicas, convencionais e orgânicas da União Européia (Coextra), feito em parceria com as principais universidades da Europa.
O estudo aponta que a instrução do processo precisa de 15 dias para verificação preliminar da documentação (CIBIO, CQB, relatórios pendentes) e publicação.
Depois, extratos devem ser publicados no Diário Oficial da União 30 dias antes da análise do processo por uma das quatro subcomissões setoriais. Em seguida, contam-se mais 30 dias até o parecer final e outros 30 dias para a aprovação nas subcomissões setoriais. Na melhor hipótese, terão sido consumidos 75 dias. Na pior, 105 dias. A liberação comercial precisa passar por todas as subcomissões setoriais e ter um parecer final único.
O prazo mínimo da audiência pública fica em 30 dias porque demanda outra análise de documentos e novo parecer final em caso de manifestações públicas. Até aí, serão até 165 dias desde o início do processo. São mais cinco dias para publicação do parecer. Se houver suspensão da decisão da CTNBio, contam-se mais 30 dias.
Nessa altura, terão decorridos entre 170 e 200 dias. Se o conselho de ministros solicitar a análise do parecer, outros 60 dias serão usados. Se determinar diligências ou consultas, serão mais 30 dias. Depois disso, os órgãos de registro e fiscalização têm até 120 dias de prazo para concluir o processo.
(Valor Econômico, 13/3)
Liberação de produtos pela CTNBio pode levar até quase dois anos, mostra estudo da Anvisa
Mauro Zanatta escreve para o “Valor Econômico”:
Passada a euforia com a aprovação da nova Lei de Biossegurança há um ano, as empresas de biotecnologia terão que enfrentar a dura realidade provocada pela burocracia da Comissão Técnica Nacional de Biossegurança (CTNBio).
Comemorada por defensores dos organismos geneticamente modificados como um importante instrumento para acelerar a liberação comercial de novos produtos, a lei acabou por consolidar prazos regimentais extremamente elásticos para a liberação dos transgênicos.
Um estudo inédito de especialistas da Agência Nacional de Vigilância Sanitária (Anvisa) e da Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR) mostra que o processo estabelecido pela Lei nº 11.105 pode demorar entre 290 dias (quase dez meses) e 590 dias (quase vinte meses) para ser aprovado pela CTNBio.
A estimativa de prazo não leva em conta a ordem dos processo na fila de quase 600 casos em andamento na CTNBio.
Remodelado pela nova lei, o colegiado responsável pela análise dos transgênicos ganhou diversas instâncias administrativas de recursos e apelações às suas decisões internas.
A mais emblemática é a adoção do questionamento sobre conflitos de interesses entre as decisões dos membros da comissão e suas ligações com a indústria biotecnológica.
Esse deve ser um dos mais utilizados e contestados instrumentos para emperrar os procedimentos de análise de novos casos pela CTNBio. "As empresas comemoraram a lei, mas não levaram em conta o novo ritual processual", avalia Letícia Rodrigues, gerente de Normatização e Avaliação da Anvisa e ex-representante do Ministério da Saúde no colegiado.
A especialista aponta outras "inovações" no processo como a realização de audiências públicas, exigências de licenciamento ambiental, avaliações de risco ambiental e aspectos sócio-econômicas, estudos sobre atividades com significativa degradação ambiental, diligências adicionais e consultas a especialistas, questionamentos sobre sigilo industrial e os recursos das partes interessadas, como ONGs e associações de produtores, por exemplo.
A nova lei também prevê apelações dos órgãos de registro e fiscalização dos ministérios da Agricultura, Meio Ambiente e Saúde, além da suspensão da tramitação do processo por 180 dias para novos estudos e esclarecimentos.
"E pode ainda haver a avocação do conselho de ministros para tratar de casos especiais", diz Victor Pelaez, professor do Departamento de Economia da UFPR.
O levantamento fará parte de um projeto de "coexistência" entre culturas transgênicas, convencionais e orgânicas da União Européia (Coextra), feito em parceria com as principais universidades da Europa.
O estudo aponta que a instrução do processo precisa de 15 dias para verificação preliminar da documentação (CIBIO, CQB, relatórios pendentes) e publicação.
Depois, extratos devem ser publicados no Diário Oficial da União 30 dias antes da análise do processo por uma das quatro subcomissões setoriais. Em seguida, contam-se mais 30 dias até o parecer final e outros 30 dias para a aprovação nas subcomissões setoriais. Na melhor hipótese, terão sido consumidos 75 dias. Na pior, 105 dias. A liberação comercial precisa passar por todas as subcomissões setoriais e ter um parecer final único.
O prazo mínimo da audiência pública fica em 30 dias porque demanda outra análise de documentos e novo parecer final em caso de manifestações públicas. Até aí, serão até 165 dias desde o início do processo. São mais cinco dias para publicação do parecer. Se houver suspensão da decisão da CTNBio, contam-se mais 30 dias.
Nessa altura, terão decorridos entre 170 e 200 dias. Se o conselho de ministros solicitar a análise do parecer, outros 60 dias serão usados. Se determinar diligências ou consultas, serão mais 30 dias. Depois disso, os órgãos de registro e fiscalização têm até 120 dias de prazo para concluir o processo.
(Valor Econômico, 13/3)
sexta-feira, março 10, 2006
57) E agora, o "neocon" original, hoje um ex-neocon, na ofensiva contra seus antigos aliados intelectuais...
After Neoconservatism
By Francis Fukuyama
The New York Times, February 19, 2006
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html?ex=1142139600&en=70a46430e2f789d2&ei=5070
As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.
The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document.
But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback. Perceived failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy "realists" in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and articles decrying America's naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world. The administration's second-term efforts to push for greater Middle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring rhetoric of Bush's second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding of elections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June). But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In his second inaugural, Bush said that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," but the charge will be made with increasing frequency that the Bush administration made a big mistake when it stirred the pot, and that the United States would have done better to stick by its traditional authoritarian friends in the Middle East. Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has been attacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like Jeffrey Sachs and by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan.
The reaction against democracy promotion and an activist foreign policy may not end there. Those whom Walter Russell Mead labels Jacksonian conservatives - red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are fighting and dying in the Middle East - supported the Iraq war because they believed that their children were fighting to defend the United States against nuclear terrorism, not to promote democracy. They don't want to abandon the president in the middle of a vicious war, but down the road the perceived failure of the Iraq intervention may push them to favor a more isolationist foreign policy, which is a more natural political position for them. A recent Pew poll indicates a swing in public opinion toward isolationism; the percentage of Americans saying that the United States "should mind its own business" has never been higher since the end of the Vietnam War.
More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives both inside and outside the Bush administration who pushed for democratizing Iraq and the broader Middle East. They are widely credited (or blamed) for being the decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq, and yet it is their idealistic agenda that in the coming months and years will be the most directly threatened. Were the United States to retreat from the world stage, following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy, because American power and influence have been critical to the maintenance of an open and increasingly democratic order around the world. The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.
The Neoconservative Legacy
How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that they risk undermining their own goals? The Bush administration's first-term foreign policy did not flow ineluctably from the views of earlier generations of people who considered themselves neoconservatives, since those views were themselves complex and subject to differing interpretations. Four common principles or threads ran through much of this thought up through the end of the cold war: a concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends.
The problem was that two of these principles were in potential collision. The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering - which in earlier years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare - suggested a cautious approach toward remaking the world and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipated consequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on the other hand, implied that American activism could reshape the structure of global politics. By the time of the Iraq war, the belief in the transformational uses of power had prevailed over the doubts about social engineering.
In retrospect, things did not have to develop this way. The roots of neoconservatism lie in a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals who attended City College of New York (C.C.N.Y.) in the mid- to late 1930's and early 1940's, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story of this group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a documentary film by Joseph Dorman called "Arguing the World." The most important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense anti-Communism.
It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism and brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in contrast to the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930's and 1940's came to realize that "real existing socialism" had become a monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives, the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that would underlie the life work of many members of this group.
If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare). A major theme running through James Q. Wilson's extensive writings on crime was the idea that you could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying problems like poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on shorter-term measures that went after symptoms of social distress (like subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes.
How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the "root cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended.
Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also to "tear down this wall." His assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, Richard Perle, was denounced as the "prince of darkness" for this uncompromising, hard-line position; his proposal for a double-zero in the intermediate-range nuclear arms negotiations (that is, the complete elimination of medium-range missiles) was attacked as hopelessly out of touch by the bien-pensant centrist foreign-policy experts at places like the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. That community felt that the Reaganites were dangerously utopian in their hopes for actually winning, as opposed to managing, the cold war.
And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened in 1989-91. Gorbachev accepted not only the double zero but also deep cuts in conventional forces, and then failed to stop the Polish, Hungarian and East German defections from the empire. Communism collapsed within a couple of years because of its internal moral weaknesses and contradictions, and with regime change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact threat to the West evaporated.
The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book "Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades."
This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. According to George Packer's recent book on Iraq, "The Assassins' Gate," the Pentagon planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the summer following the invasion.
By the 1990's, neoconservatism had been fed by several other intellectual streams. One came from the students of the German Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss, who, contrary to much of the nonsense written about him by people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a serious reader of philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or policy issues. Rather, he was concerned with the "crisis of modernity" brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had hoped. Another stream came from Albert Wohlstetter, a Rand Corporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad (the current American ambassador to Iraq) and Paul Wolfowitz (the former deputy secretary of defense), among other people. Wohlstetter was intensely concerned with the problem of nuclear proliferation and the way that the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty left loopholes, in its support for "peaceful" nuclear energy, large enough for countries like Iraq and Iran to walk through.
I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss's protégé Allan Bloom, who wrote the bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind"; worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern - that is, technologically advanced and prosperous - society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.
"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.
The Failure of Benevolent Hegemony
The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters did not simply underestimate the difficulty of bringing about congenial political outcomes in places like Iraq; they also misunderstood the way the world would react to the use of American power. Of course, the cold war was replete with instances of what the foreign policy analyst Stephen Sestanovich calls American maximalism, wherein Washington acted first and sought legitimacy and support from its allies only after the fact. But in the post-cold-war period, the structural situation of world politics changed in ways that made this kind of exercise of power much more problematic in the eyes of even close allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of "benevolent hegemony" over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power." (Italics added.)
It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global reaction to the Iraq war, which succeeded in uniting much of the world in a frenzy of anti-Americanism. The idea that the United States is a hegemon more benevolent than most is not an absurd one, but there were warning signs that things had changed in America's relationship to the world long before the start of the Iraq war. The structural imbalance in global power had grown enormous. America surpassed the rest of the world in every dimension of power by an unprecedented margin, with its defense spending nearly equal to that of the rest of the world combined. Already during the Clinton years, American economic hegemony had generated enormous hostility to an American-dominated process of globalization, frequently on the part of close democratic allies who thought the United States was seeking to impose its antistatist social model on them.
There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court.
Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. There are sharp limits to the American people's attention to foreign affairs and willingness to finance projects overseas that do not have clear benefits to American interests. Sept. 11 changed that calculus in many ways, providing popular support for two wars in the Middle East and large increases in defense spending. But the durability of the support is uncertain: although most Americans want to do what is necessary to make the project of rebuilding Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasion did not increase the public appetite for further costly interventions. Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with their own lives and society.
Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed that the hegemon was not only well intentioned but competent as well. Much of the criticism of the Iraq intervention from Europeans and others was not based on a normative case that the United States was not getting authorization from the United Nations Security Council, but rather on the belief that it had not made an adequate case for invading Iraq in the first place and didn't know what it was doing in trying to democratize Iraq. In this, the critics were unfortunately quite prescient.
The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war's supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping.
What to Do
Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight.
The United States needs to come up with something better than "coalitions of the willing" to legitimate its dealings with other countries. The world today lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action; creating new organizations that will better balance the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary task for the coming generation. As a result of more than 200 years of political evolution, we have a relatively good understanding of how to create institutions that are rulebound, accountable and reasonably effective in the vertical silos we call states. What we do not have are adequate mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states.
The conservative critique of the United Nations is all too cogent: while useful for certain peacekeeping and nation-building operations, the United Nations lacks both democratic legitimacy and effectiveness in dealing with serious security issues. The solution is not to strengthen a single global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a "multi-multilateral world" of overlapping and occasionally competing international institutions that are organized on regional or functional lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model: when the Russian veto prevented the Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATO allies simply shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action.
The final area that needs rethinking, and the one that will be the most contested in the coming months and years, is the place of democracy promotion in American foreign policy. The worst legacy that could come from the Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians. Good governance, which involves not just democracy but also the rule of law and economic development, is critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from alleviating poverty to dealing with pandemics to controlling violent conflicts. A Wilsonian policy that pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right, but it needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its neoconservative allies.
We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. It is no accident that so many recent terrorists, from Sept. 11's Mohamed Atta to the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democratic Europe and intimately familiar with all of democracy's blessings. More democracy will mean more alienation, radicalization and - yes, unfortunately - terrorism.
But greater political participation by Islamist groups is very likely to occur whatever we do, and it will be the only way that the poison of radical Islamism can ultimately work its way through the body politic of Muslim communities around the world. The age is long since gone when friendly authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability indefinitely. New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia and Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian Gulf. A durable Israeli-Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt, illegitimate Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority. Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a formerly radical terrorist group that had been forced to deal with the realities of governing.
If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like. The United States has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can't "impose" democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.
The Bush administration has been walking - indeed, sprinting - away from the legacy of its first term, as evidenced by the cautious multilateral approach it has taken toward the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea. Condoleezza Rice gave a serious speech in January about "transformational diplomacy" and has begun an effort to reorganize the nonmilitary side of the foreign-policy establishment, and the National Security Strategy document is being rewritten. All of these are welcome changes, but the legacy of the Bush first-term foreign policy and its neoconservative supporters has been so polarizing that it is going to be hard to have a reasoned debate about how to appropriately balance American ideals and interests in the coming years. The reaction against a flawed policy can be as damaging as the policy itself, and such a reaction is an indulgence we cannot afford, given the critical moment we have arrived at in global politics.
Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world - ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about.
Francis Fukuyama teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. This essay is adapted from his book America at the Crossroads, which will be published this month by Yale University Press.
By Francis Fukuyama
The New York Times, February 19, 2006
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html?ex=1142139600&en=70a46430e2f789d2&ei=5070
As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.
The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document.
But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback. Perceived failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy "realists" in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and articles decrying America's naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world. The administration's second-term efforts to push for greater Middle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring rhetoric of Bush's second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding of elections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June). But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In his second inaugural, Bush said that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," but the charge will be made with increasing frequency that the Bush administration made a big mistake when it stirred the pot, and that the United States would have done better to stick by its traditional authoritarian friends in the Middle East. Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has been attacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like Jeffrey Sachs and by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan.
The reaction against democracy promotion and an activist foreign policy may not end there. Those whom Walter Russell Mead labels Jacksonian conservatives - red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are fighting and dying in the Middle East - supported the Iraq war because they believed that their children were fighting to defend the United States against nuclear terrorism, not to promote democracy. They don't want to abandon the president in the middle of a vicious war, but down the road the perceived failure of the Iraq intervention may push them to favor a more isolationist foreign policy, which is a more natural political position for them. A recent Pew poll indicates a swing in public opinion toward isolationism; the percentage of Americans saying that the United States "should mind its own business" has never been higher since the end of the Vietnam War.
More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives both inside and outside the Bush administration who pushed for democratizing Iraq and the broader Middle East. They are widely credited (or blamed) for being the decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq, and yet it is their idealistic agenda that in the coming months and years will be the most directly threatened. Were the United States to retreat from the world stage, following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy, because American power and influence have been critical to the maintenance of an open and increasingly democratic order around the world. The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.
The Neoconservative Legacy
How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that they risk undermining their own goals? The Bush administration's first-term foreign policy did not flow ineluctably from the views of earlier generations of people who considered themselves neoconservatives, since those views were themselves complex and subject to differing interpretations. Four common principles or threads ran through much of this thought up through the end of the cold war: a concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends.
The problem was that two of these principles were in potential collision. The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering - which in earlier years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare - suggested a cautious approach toward remaking the world and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipated consequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on the other hand, implied that American activism could reshape the structure of global politics. By the time of the Iraq war, the belief in the transformational uses of power had prevailed over the doubts about social engineering.
In retrospect, things did not have to develop this way. The roots of neoconservatism lie in a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals who attended City College of New York (C.C.N.Y.) in the mid- to late 1930's and early 1940's, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story of this group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a documentary film by Joseph Dorman called "Arguing the World." The most important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense anti-Communism.
It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism and brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in contrast to the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930's and 1940's came to realize that "real existing socialism" had become a monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives, the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that would underlie the life work of many members of this group.
If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare). A major theme running through James Q. Wilson's extensive writings on crime was the idea that you could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying problems like poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on shorter-term measures that went after symptoms of social distress (like subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes.
How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the "root cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended.
Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also to "tear down this wall." His assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, Richard Perle, was denounced as the "prince of darkness" for this uncompromising, hard-line position; his proposal for a double-zero in the intermediate-range nuclear arms negotiations (that is, the complete elimination of medium-range missiles) was attacked as hopelessly out of touch by the bien-pensant centrist foreign-policy experts at places like the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. That community felt that the Reaganites were dangerously utopian in their hopes for actually winning, as opposed to managing, the cold war.
And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened in 1989-91. Gorbachev accepted not only the double zero but also deep cuts in conventional forces, and then failed to stop the Polish, Hungarian and East German defections from the empire. Communism collapsed within a couple of years because of its internal moral weaknesses and contradictions, and with regime change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact threat to the West evaporated.
The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book "Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades."
This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. According to George Packer's recent book on Iraq, "The Assassins' Gate," the Pentagon planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the summer following the invasion.
By the 1990's, neoconservatism had been fed by several other intellectual streams. One came from the students of the German Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss, who, contrary to much of the nonsense written about him by people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a serious reader of philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or policy issues. Rather, he was concerned with the "crisis of modernity" brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had hoped. Another stream came from Albert Wohlstetter, a Rand Corporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad (the current American ambassador to Iraq) and Paul Wolfowitz (the former deputy secretary of defense), among other people. Wohlstetter was intensely concerned with the problem of nuclear proliferation and the way that the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty left loopholes, in its support for "peaceful" nuclear energy, large enough for countries like Iraq and Iran to walk through.
I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss's protégé Allan Bloom, who wrote the bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind"; worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern - that is, technologically advanced and prosperous - society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.
"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.
The Failure of Benevolent Hegemony
The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters did not simply underestimate the difficulty of bringing about congenial political outcomes in places like Iraq; they also misunderstood the way the world would react to the use of American power. Of course, the cold war was replete with instances of what the foreign policy analyst Stephen Sestanovich calls American maximalism, wherein Washington acted first and sought legitimacy and support from its allies only after the fact. But in the post-cold-war period, the structural situation of world politics changed in ways that made this kind of exercise of power much more problematic in the eyes of even close allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of "benevolent hegemony" over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power." (Italics added.)
It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global reaction to the Iraq war, which succeeded in uniting much of the world in a frenzy of anti-Americanism. The idea that the United States is a hegemon more benevolent than most is not an absurd one, but there were warning signs that things had changed in America's relationship to the world long before the start of the Iraq war. The structural imbalance in global power had grown enormous. America surpassed the rest of the world in every dimension of power by an unprecedented margin, with its defense spending nearly equal to that of the rest of the world combined. Already during the Clinton years, American economic hegemony had generated enormous hostility to an American-dominated process of globalization, frequently on the part of close democratic allies who thought the United States was seeking to impose its antistatist social model on them.
There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court.
Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. There are sharp limits to the American people's attention to foreign affairs and willingness to finance projects overseas that do not have clear benefits to American interests. Sept. 11 changed that calculus in many ways, providing popular support for two wars in the Middle East and large increases in defense spending. But the durability of the support is uncertain: although most Americans want to do what is necessary to make the project of rebuilding Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasion did not increase the public appetite for further costly interventions. Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with their own lives and society.
Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed that the hegemon was not only well intentioned but competent as well. Much of the criticism of the Iraq intervention from Europeans and others was not based on a normative case that the United States was not getting authorization from the United Nations Security Council, but rather on the belief that it had not made an adequate case for invading Iraq in the first place and didn't know what it was doing in trying to democratize Iraq. In this, the critics were unfortunately quite prescient.
The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war's supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping.
What to Do
Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight.
The United States needs to come up with something better than "coalitions of the willing" to legitimate its dealings with other countries. The world today lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action; creating new organizations that will better balance the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary task for the coming generation. As a result of more than 200 years of political evolution, we have a relatively good understanding of how to create institutions that are rulebound, accountable and reasonably effective in the vertical silos we call states. What we do not have are adequate mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states.
The conservative critique of the United Nations is all too cogent: while useful for certain peacekeeping and nation-building operations, the United Nations lacks both democratic legitimacy and effectiveness in dealing with serious security issues. The solution is not to strengthen a single global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a "multi-multilateral world" of overlapping and occasionally competing international institutions that are organized on regional or functional lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model: when the Russian veto prevented the Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATO allies simply shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action.
The final area that needs rethinking, and the one that will be the most contested in the coming months and years, is the place of democracy promotion in American foreign policy. The worst legacy that could come from the Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians. Good governance, which involves not just democracy but also the rule of law and economic development, is critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from alleviating poverty to dealing with pandemics to controlling violent conflicts. A Wilsonian policy that pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right, but it needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its neoconservative allies.
We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. It is no accident that so many recent terrorists, from Sept. 11's Mohamed Atta to the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democratic Europe and intimately familiar with all of democracy's blessings. More democracy will mean more alienation, radicalization and - yes, unfortunately - terrorism.
But greater political participation by Islamist groups is very likely to occur whatever we do, and it will be the only way that the poison of radical Islamism can ultimately work its way through the body politic of Muslim communities around the world. The age is long since gone when friendly authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability indefinitely. New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia and Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian Gulf. A durable Israeli-Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt, illegitimate Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority. Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a formerly radical terrorist group that had been forced to deal with the realities of governing.
If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like. The United States has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can't "impose" democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.
The Bush administration has been walking - indeed, sprinting - away from the legacy of its first term, as evidenced by the cautious multilateral approach it has taken toward the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea. Condoleezza Rice gave a serious speech in January about "transformational diplomacy" and has begun an effort to reorganize the nonmilitary side of the foreign-policy establishment, and the National Security Strategy document is being rewritten. All of these are welcome changes, but the legacy of the Bush first-term foreign policy and its neoconservative supporters has been so polarizing that it is going to be hard to have a reasoned debate about how to appropriately balance American ideals and interests in the coming years. The reaction against a flawed policy can be as damaging as the policy itself, and such a reaction is an indulgence we cannot afford, given the critical moment we have arrived at in global politics.
Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world - ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about.
Francis Fukuyama teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. This essay is adapted from his book America at the Crossroads, which will be published this month by Yale University Press.
56) Os "neocons" na defensiva...
Jornal Valor Econômico - 10.3.06 - pág. A15
Grupo que defendeu a invasão do Iraque errou ao acreditar que todos os países são iguais
Por Jacob Weisberg, colunista do Financial Times
Em meio ao agravamento persistente da situação no Iraque sob a ocupação americana - a questão agora é se é possível evitar uma guerra civil - o exame de como entramos nessa confusão é cada vez mais premente. Diversos históricos instantâneos e relatos de bastidores do processo de tomada de decisões do governo Bush já foram publicados. Mas é um livro que não contém quaisquer relatos inéditos o que melhor conseguiu explicar por que o desastre desenrolou-se da maneira que conhecemos. "America at the Crossroads" ("EUA na Encruzilhada"), de Francis Fukuyama, argumenta que os americanos cometeram o erro de ir ao Iraque sem preparar-se para uma ocupação hostil por causa da errônea linha de pensamento de política externa de um pequeno grupo de pessoas denominadas neoconservadoras.
"Neoconservador" tornou-se um termo de tal carga emocional que tende a obliterar qualquer discussão civilizada. Alguns europeus o empregam como sinônimo de defensores da guerra no Iraque ou para designar belicistas sofisticados em geral. Nas extremas esquerda e direita americanas, "neocon" freqüentemente ressalta a identidade judaica de muitos de seus adeptos, sugerindo que eles se importam mais com Israel do que com os EUA. Fukuyama, que até recentemente incluía-se entre os neoconservadores, define o termo não pela história compartilhada de seus membros, mas por seu conjunto de idéias compartilhado.
Embora haja infinitas exceções, os "neocons" mais influentes são "wilsonianos linha-dura" com relação à política externa. Eles rejeitam a noção realista, mais fortemente identificada com Henry Kissinger, segundo a qual os EUA deveriam agir apenas segundo seus interesses. Em vez disso, os "neocons" acreditam que os EUA devem oferecer ao mundo sua liderança moral, disseminando liberdade e idéias democráticas - pela força, se necessário. Eles acreditam no valor das alianças, mas não dão bola para instituições mundiais ou para as minúcias da legislação internacional. Segundo essa caracterização, Fukuyama inclui entre os "neocons" tanto Ronald Reagan como o George W. Bush do segundo mandato, alguém tão distante quanto seria possível imaginar de um intelectual judaico.
Embora continue simpático à missão de disseminação da democracia, Fukuyama critica as inflexões unilaterais e militaristas que produziram conceitos como os de "guerra preventiva" e "mudança de regime". Os "neocons", argumenta ele, abandonaram sua idéia política fundamental, isto é, de que esquemas ambiciosos para remodelar sociedades são fadados ao fracasso e produzem conseqüências não pretendidas. "Oposição à engenharia social utópica", escreve Fukuyama, "é o mais inabalável fundamento de todo o movimento". No entanto, os "neocons" estão hoje atolados numa tentativa de transformar um semipaís mal compreendido, catastroficamente destruído e de realidade profundamente diferente no Oriente Médio. Como foi que essas pessoas inteligentes desviaram tanto do curso? Embora Fukuyama não faça tal comparação, o fracasso deles lembra cada vez mais o dos arquitetos da guerra no Vietnã.
No primeiro ato da tragédia neoconservadora, um movimento intelectual surge, no início da década de 60, animado pela equivocada expansão do Estado de bem-estar social americano por Lyndon B. Johnson. Aplicando uma versão de sua crítica ao totalitarismo comunista ao liberalismo da "grande sociedade", as primeiras figuras chave do movimento, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer e Daniel Patrick Moynihan, argumentam que boas intenções estão encalhando nas águas rasas da humanidade recalcitrante e na ignorância sobre as realidades da pobreza. O que diferencia esses autores de seus colegas liberais de pensamento mais convencional é um agudo ceticismo sobre a possibilidade de transformação social e arguto empirismo sobre pessoas, programas e resultados.
No segundo ato, no fim da década de 70, um elenco um pouco diferente dos "neocons" aplica à política externa americana a mesma idéia da era da détente. Aqui, há cenas de hostilidade à ONU e de enfrentamentos com o realismo de Kissinger, que eles consideram excessivamente tolerante com o comunismo. Mais uma vez, eles parecem, em retrospecto, premonitórios.
É apenas no terceiro ato que os neoconservadores dão com os burros catastroficamente n'água. Imbuídos, pelas revoluções em 1989, de um senso de seu próprio acerto e do predomínio incontestado dos EUA, os "neocons" passam a imaginar que até mesmo sociedades atrasadas, não ocidentais e desprovidas de tradições liberais são capazes de trilhar um caminho pós-totalitário polonês. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle e William Kristol fantasiam que uma dúbia figura garibaldiana, Ahmed Chalabi, é capaz de derrubar o ditador mais perverso do mundo com um pequeno bando de seguidores. Depois que isso se revelou inútil, eles convencem o vice-presidente e o secretário de Defesa dos EUA - e em última instância, o próprio presidente - de que, depois que os militares americanos terminarem o trabalho, os iraquianos abraçarão as forças de ocupação em seu país. Ao vencer essa batalha, clímax dessa trama, os "neocons" esquecem-se de quem são. Suas duas melhores qualidades - ceticismo em face de mudanças comandadas por governos e empirismo sociológico - perderam-se ao longo do caminho. Fukuyama é particularmente crítico quando discute o fermento intelectual, no curso do últimos 15 anos, em torno da questão de como são realizadas transições democráticas. Os "neocons" destacados que apoiaram a guerra permaneceram, de modo geral, fora desse debate, e é difícil "encontrar grandes discussões sobre a mecânica concreta de como os EUA estimulariam instituições democráticas ou desenvolvimento econômico", escreve ele.
Nas tragédias gregas, a queda do herói é freqüentemente plotada em termos de sua "hamartia"- "erro trágico" do herói que redunda em catástrofe. O que em última instância lançou os "neocons" em desgraça pode ter sido um gosto residual pelo pensamento categórico marxista-hegeliano. Pessoas que deveriam ser mais esclarecidas passaram a acreditar que qualquer país é igual a outro e que a inevitabilidade histórica faria o trabalho braçal por eles. Agora, a tragédia neoconservadora é também nossa.
Grupo que defendeu a invasão do Iraque errou ao acreditar que todos os países são iguais
Por Jacob Weisberg, colunista do Financial Times
Em meio ao agravamento persistente da situação no Iraque sob a ocupação americana - a questão agora é se é possível evitar uma guerra civil - o exame de como entramos nessa confusão é cada vez mais premente. Diversos históricos instantâneos e relatos de bastidores do processo de tomada de decisões do governo Bush já foram publicados. Mas é um livro que não contém quaisquer relatos inéditos o que melhor conseguiu explicar por que o desastre desenrolou-se da maneira que conhecemos. "America at the Crossroads" ("EUA na Encruzilhada"), de Francis Fukuyama, argumenta que os americanos cometeram o erro de ir ao Iraque sem preparar-se para uma ocupação hostil por causa da errônea linha de pensamento de política externa de um pequeno grupo de pessoas denominadas neoconservadoras.
"Neoconservador" tornou-se um termo de tal carga emocional que tende a obliterar qualquer discussão civilizada. Alguns europeus o empregam como sinônimo de defensores da guerra no Iraque ou para designar belicistas sofisticados em geral. Nas extremas esquerda e direita americanas, "neocon" freqüentemente ressalta a identidade judaica de muitos de seus adeptos, sugerindo que eles se importam mais com Israel do que com os EUA. Fukuyama, que até recentemente incluía-se entre os neoconservadores, define o termo não pela história compartilhada de seus membros, mas por seu conjunto de idéias compartilhado.
Embora haja infinitas exceções, os "neocons" mais influentes são "wilsonianos linha-dura" com relação à política externa. Eles rejeitam a noção realista, mais fortemente identificada com Henry Kissinger, segundo a qual os EUA deveriam agir apenas segundo seus interesses. Em vez disso, os "neocons" acreditam que os EUA devem oferecer ao mundo sua liderança moral, disseminando liberdade e idéias democráticas - pela força, se necessário. Eles acreditam no valor das alianças, mas não dão bola para instituições mundiais ou para as minúcias da legislação internacional. Segundo essa caracterização, Fukuyama inclui entre os "neocons" tanto Ronald Reagan como o George W. Bush do segundo mandato, alguém tão distante quanto seria possível imaginar de um intelectual judaico.
Embora continue simpático à missão de disseminação da democracia, Fukuyama critica as inflexões unilaterais e militaristas que produziram conceitos como os de "guerra preventiva" e "mudança de regime". Os "neocons", argumenta ele, abandonaram sua idéia política fundamental, isto é, de que esquemas ambiciosos para remodelar sociedades são fadados ao fracasso e produzem conseqüências não pretendidas. "Oposição à engenharia social utópica", escreve Fukuyama, "é o mais inabalável fundamento de todo o movimento". No entanto, os "neocons" estão hoje atolados numa tentativa de transformar um semipaís mal compreendido, catastroficamente destruído e de realidade profundamente diferente no Oriente Médio. Como foi que essas pessoas inteligentes desviaram tanto do curso? Embora Fukuyama não faça tal comparação, o fracasso deles lembra cada vez mais o dos arquitetos da guerra no Vietnã.
No primeiro ato da tragédia neoconservadora, um movimento intelectual surge, no início da década de 60, animado pela equivocada expansão do Estado de bem-estar social americano por Lyndon B. Johnson. Aplicando uma versão de sua crítica ao totalitarismo comunista ao liberalismo da "grande sociedade", as primeiras figuras chave do movimento, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer e Daniel Patrick Moynihan, argumentam que boas intenções estão encalhando nas águas rasas da humanidade recalcitrante e na ignorância sobre as realidades da pobreza. O que diferencia esses autores de seus colegas liberais de pensamento mais convencional é um agudo ceticismo sobre a possibilidade de transformação social e arguto empirismo sobre pessoas, programas e resultados.
No segundo ato, no fim da década de 70, um elenco um pouco diferente dos "neocons" aplica à política externa americana a mesma idéia da era da détente. Aqui, há cenas de hostilidade à ONU e de enfrentamentos com o realismo de Kissinger, que eles consideram excessivamente tolerante com o comunismo. Mais uma vez, eles parecem, em retrospecto, premonitórios.
É apenas no terceiro ato que os neoconservadores dão com os burros catastroficamente n'água. Imbuídos, pelas revoluções em 1989, de um senso de seu próprio acerto e do predomínio incontestado dos EUA, os "neocons" passam a imaginar que até mesmo sociedades atrasadas, não ocidentais e desprovidas de tradições liberais são capazes de trilhar um caminho pós-totalitário polonês. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle e William Kristol fantasiam que uma dúbia figura garibaldiana, Ahmed Chalabi, é capaz de derrubar o ditador mais perverso do mundo com um pequeno bando de seguidores. Depois que isso se revelou inútil, eles convencem o vice-presidente e o secretário de Defesa dos EUA - e em última instância, o próprio presidente - de que, depois que os militares americanos terminarem o trabalho, os iraquianos abraçarão as forças de ocupação em seu país. Ao vencer essa batalha, clímax dessa trama, os "neocons" esquecem-se de quem são. Suas duas melhores qualidades - ceticismo em face de mudanças comandadas por governos e empirismo sociológico - perderam-se ao longo do caminho. Fukuyama é particularmente crítico quando discute o fermento intelectual, no curso do últimos 15 anos, em torno da questão de como são realizadas transições democráticas. Os "neocons" destacados que apoiaram a guerra permaneceram, de modo geral, fora desse debate, e é difícil "encontrar grandes discussões sobre a mecânica concreta de como os EUA estimulariam instituições democráticas ou desenvolvimento econômico", escreve ele.
Nas tragédias gregas, a queda do herói é freqüentemente plotada em termos de sua "hamartia"- "erro trágico" do herói que redunda em catástrofe. O que em última instância lançou os "neocons" em desgraça pode ter sido um gosto residual pelo pensamento categórico marxista-hegeliano. Pessoas que deveriam ser mais esclarecidas passaram a acreditar que qualquer país é igual a outro e que a inevitabilidade histórica faria o trabalho braçal por eles. Agora, a tragédia neoconservadora é também nossa.
55) Rio Grande do Sul: o estado ideal...
Calma, não é para agora...
Seria para daqui a 15 ou 20 anos, se tudo der certo.
Em todo caso, líderes do Rio Grande do Sul já tomaram consciência dos problemas atuais e do que deve ser feito para encaminhar soluções satisfatórias a cada um deles.
Leiam a matéria desta sexta-feira, 10 de março de 2006, do jornal gaúcho Zero Hora:
"Futuro ideal do Estado toma forma
Representantes dos poderes e de entidades empresariais e de trabalhadores esboçaram ontem soluções para tirar o Estado da estagnação em encontro do projeto O Rio Grande que queremos.
Apesar de agregar categorias com bandeiras distintas, os cerca de 800 participantes da primeira etapa do projeto O Rio Grande que queremos - agenda estratégica 2006-2020 conseguiram finalizar ontem um esboço do futuro ideal do Estado nos próximos 15 anos.
Depois de diagnosticar o que emperra ou estimula o desenvolvimento gaúcho na quarta-feira, entidades de trabalhadores, empresários e poderes definiram 91 manchetes positivas de jornais a serem lidas até 2020. Uma equipe técnica permanente irá se basear no material para detalhar objetivos de curto, médio e longo prazos. Em agosto, o trabalho com soluções estará concluído (veja o quadro).
O segredo do consenso foi engavetar reclamações pontuais e focar problemas globais, como a crise financeira. O Estado teve um déficit de R$ 755 milhões nas contas públicas no ano passado e está à frente apenas do Piauí quando se trata de capacidade de investimento.
- O filtro final já saiu. Há agendas pessoais, mas as coletivas são as mesmas - explica Flávio Sabbadini, presidente da Federação do Comércio de Bens e de Serviços do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (Fecomércio).
Segundo o presidente da Federação da Agricultura do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (Farsul), Carlos Sperotto, é preciso respeitar os resultados da discussão:
- Nosso setor defendeu que temos de mudar o perfil produtivo gaúcho e diversificar.
CUT não quis participar do Agenda estratégica
Presidente estadual da Força Sindical, Cláudio Janta deixou de lado a regulamentação de leis e a redução da jornada de trabalho. A entidade representa 76 sindicatos da iniciativa privada, dois sindicatos estaduais e cinco federações, totalizando 1,1 milhão de filiados.
- Não podemos ficar discutindo o mínimo enquanto fábricas fecham e trabalhadores são demitidos devido à crise do Estado. Não dá para perder mais 20 anos - diz.
A Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) se recusou a participar das discussões na Fiergs. Em nota oficial, a entidade sustenta que há um desequilíbrio na participação de empresários e trabalhadores. Afirma que organizações sociais históricas, como o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), não foram convidadas para o processo de construção coletiva. Em abril, a CUT irá realizar um seminário para discutir crise e desenvolvimento no Estado.
As conclusões da primeira etapa do projeto
O que impulsionou o crescimento do Estado nas últimas cinco décadas
- Espírito empreendedor do gaúcho
- Formação cultural e étnica variada
- Sistema educacional diferenciado
- Vontade e força política dos governantes
- Capacidade de trabalho
- Qualidade humana
- Organização da sociedade
- Preservação dos valores morais
- Localização geográfica
O que prejudicou o desenvolvimento gaúcho
- O custo do Estado (burocracia, falta de sustentabilidade da previdência pública e baixa capacidade de investimento)
- Aumento da carga tributária e concentração na esfera federal
- Decadência da qualidade da educação
Qual o futuro ideal
Participantes definiram 91 manchetes de jornais a serem lidas até 2020. Veja as principais:
"Estado tem crescimento de 9% em 2020, com crescimento médio de 8% ao ano"
"ONU reconhece qualidade do ensino gaúcho"
"RS é referência mundial em qualidade de vida"
"RS é referência nacional em gestão pública"
"RS é exemplo de desenvolvimento sustentável"
"Carga tributária atinge índice de países que mais crescem"
"RS atinge auto-suficiência de energia"
"RS investe 20% da arrecadação"
"RS é o Estado que mais cresceu nos últimos 10 anos no Brasil"
"RS: 14 anos sem greves e invasões"
"Renda per capita gaúcha supera à da Coréia do Sul"
"Zerado o déficit habitacional no RS"
"O RS é um Estado seguro"
"Melhor taxa de distribuição de renda é a do RS"
"Extra: grupo Agenda Estratégica de 2006 reúne-se em 8 de março de 2020 para festejar os objetivos superados"
Os próximos passos
Março
Técnicos das federações empresariais e consultores começam a esmiuçar as propostas e verificar a viabilidade. A equipe técnica será permanente.
26 de abril
Cerca de 60 pessoas escolhidas no primeiro seminário se reúnem e começam a detalhar objetivos de curto, médio e longo prazos com base no documento finalizado em março.
Os participantes irão criar de 10 a 15 comitês temáticos para discutir problemas e soluções até agosto.
28 de junho
O grupo formado no primeiro seminário irá definir indicadores, metas e ações e meios de atingi-los.
Início de agosto
Um documento definitivo com diagnóstico, soluções e metas para o Estado até 2020 será entregue aos candidatos a governador. Uma ONG será criada para acompanhar a aplicação das medidas sugeridas permanentemente."
Nota final PRA:
Bem, o diagnóstico foi feito, o caderno de tarefas foi feito, agora falta cumpri-lo. Trata-se, em todo caso, de um bom começo para um debate racional sobre prioridades para a agenda do estado na campanha eleitoral estadual deste ano de 2006.
Eu não sou gaúcho, mas desejo cumprimentar a todos os envolvidos neste exercício pela clareza da iniciativa e pela disposição demonstrada em começar a arregaçar as mangas em torno de propostas concretas para tirar a economia do estado do relativo marasmo em que ela vive hoje.
Que tal se o Brasil fizesse o mesmo?
Seria para daqui a 15 ou 20 anos, se tudo der certo.
Em todo caso, líderes do Rio Grande do Sul já tomaram consciência dos problemas atuais e do que deve ser feito para encaminhar soluções satisfatórias a cada um deles.
Leiam a matéria desta sexta-feira, 10 de março de 2006, do jornal gaúcho Zero Hora:
"Futuro ideal do Estado toma forma
Representantes dos poderes e de entidades empresariais e de trabalhadores esboçaram ontem soluções para tirar o Estado da estagnação em encontro do projeto O Rio Grande que queremos.
Apesar de agregar categorias com bandeiras distintas, os cerca de 800 participantes da primeira etapa do projeto O Rio Grande que queremos - agenda estratégica 2006-2020 conseguiram finalizar ontem um esboço do futuro ideal do Estado nos próximos 15 anos.
Depois de diagnosticar o que emperra ou estimula o desenvolvimento gaúcho na quarta-feira, entidades de trabalhadores, empresários e poderes definiram 91 manchetes positivas de jornais a serem lidas até 2020. Uma equipe técnica permanente irá se basear no material para detalhar objetivos de curto, médio e longo prazos. Em agosto, o trabalho com soluções estará concluído (veja o quadro).
O segredo do consenso foi engavetar reclamações pontuais e focar problemas globais, como a crise financeira. O Estado teve um déficit de R$ 755 milhões nas contas públicas no ano passado e está à frente apenas do Piauí quando se trata de capacidade de investimento.
- O filtro final já saiu. Há agendas pessoais, mas as coletivas são as mesmas - explica Flávio Sabbadini, presidente da Federação do Comércio de Bens e de Serviços do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (Fecomércio).
Segundo o presidente da Federação da Agricultura do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (Farsul), Carlos Sperotto, é preciso respeitar os resultados da discussão:
- Nosso setor defendeu que temos de mudar o perfil produtivo gaúcho e diversificar.
CUT não quis participar do Agenda estratégica
Presidente estadual da Força Sindical, Cláudio Janta deixou de lado a regulamentação de leis e a redução da jornada de trabalho. A entidade representa 76 sindicatos da iniciativa privada, dois sindicatos estaduais e cinco federações, totalizando 1,1 milhão de filiados.
- Não podemos ficar discutindo o mínimo enquanto fábricas fecham e trabalhadores são demitidos devido à crise do Estado. Não dá para perder mais 20 anos - diz.
A Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) se recusou a participar das discussões na Fiergs. Em nota oficial, a entidade sustenta que há um desequilíbrio na participação de empresários e trabalhadores. Afirma que organizações sociais históricas, como o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), não foram convidadas para o processo de construção coletiva. Em abril, a CUT irá realizar um seminário para discutir crise e desenvolvimento no Estado.
As conclusões da primeira etapa do projeto
O que impulsionou o crescimento do Estado nas últimas cinco décadas
- Espírito empreendedor do gaúcho
- Formação cultural e étnica variada
- Sistema educacional diferenciado
- Vontade e força política dos governantes
- Capacidade de trabalho
- Qualidade humana
- Organização da sociedade
- Preservação dos valores morais
- Localização geográfica
O que prejudicou o desenvolvimento gaúcho
- O custo do Estado (burocracia, falta de sustentabilidade da previdência pública e baixa capacidade de investimento)
- Aumento da carga tributária e concentração na esfera federal
- Decadência da qualidade da educação
Qual o futuro ideal
Participantes definiram 91 manchetes de jornais a serem lidas até 2020. Veja as principais:
"Estado tem crescimento de 9% em 2020, com crescimento médio de 8% ao ano"
"ONU reconhece qualidade do ensino gaúcho"
"RS é referência mundial em qualidade de vida"
"RS é referência nacional em gestão pública"
"RS é exemplo de desenvolvimento sustentável"
"Carga tributária atinge índice de países que mais crescem"
"RS atinge auto-suficiência de energia"
"RS investe 20% da arrecadação"
"RS é o Estado que mais cresceu nos últimos 10 anos no Brasil"
"RS: 14 anos sem greves e invasões"
"Renda per capita gaúcha supera à da Coréia do Sul"
"Zerado o déficit habitacional no RS"
"O RS é um Estado seguro"
"Melhor taxa de distribuição de renda é a do RS"
"Extra: grupo Agenda Estratégica de 2006 reúne-se em 8 de março de 2020 para festejar os objetivos superados"
Os próximos passos
Março
Técnicos das federações empresariais e consultores começam a esmiuçar as propostas e verificar a viabilidade. A equipe técnica será permanente.
26 de abril
Cerca de 60 pessoas escolhidas no primeiro seminário se reúnem e começam a detalhar objetivos de curto, médio e longo prazos com base no documento finalizado em março.
Os participantes irão criar de 10 a 15 comitês temáticos para discutir problemas e soluções até agosto.
28 de junho
O grupo formado no primeiro seminário irá definir indicadores, metas e ações e meios de atingi-los.
Início de agosto
Um documento definitivo com diagnóstico, soluções e metas para o Estado até 2020 será entregue aos candidatos a governador. Uma ONG será criada para acompanhar a aplicação das medidas sugeridas permanentemente."
Nota final PRA:
Bem, o diagnóstico foi feito, o caderno de tarefas foi feito, agora falta cumpri-lo. Trata-se, em todo caso, de um bom começo para um debate racional sobre prioridades para a agenda do estado na campanha eleitoral estadual deste ano de 2006.
Eu não sou gaúcho, mas desejo cumprimentar a todos os envolvidos neste exercício pela clareza da iniciativa e pela disposição demonstrada em começar a arregaçar as mangas em torno de propostas concretas para tirar a economia do estado do relativo marasmo em que ela vive hoje.
Que tal se o Brasil fizesse o mesmo?
54) TV digital: a confusão está instalada...
Transcrevo abaixo material retirado do Jornal da Ciência, edição de 10 de março de 2006, sobre a confusão instalada em relação à escolha de um padrão para a TV digital barsileira.
Figura em primeiro lugar mensagem que eu mandei para esse jornal, seguida de matéria transcrita da Agência Carta Maior:
Leitor opina sobre o processo de escolha do padrão de TV digital
Que tal, se por uma vez, o Estado dissesse: renuncio a uma escolha que sempre será parcial, incompleta e falha, e deixo à sociedade e aos agentes econômicos a liberdade de escolha
Mensagem de Paulo Roberto de Almeida, sociólogo (pralmeida@mac.com e http://www.pralmeida.org):
“Perguntar não ofende: Se é para defender a soberania nacional e os interesses ditos populares na definição de um padrão para a TV digital no Brasil, e se a definição por algum dos existentes, ou mesmo a de um novo, híbrido, como defendem alguns, sempre se dará em detrimento de uma série de vantagens (ou desvantagens) inevitavelmente associadas a qualquer um deles, por que não optar pelo óbvio, pelo mais simples, pelo que dá a maior liberdade possível a todos e a cada um, por que não optar por um que desobrigue o Estado de ter de fazer uma dolorosa e dubitável escolha, que sempre será acusada de parcial e leviana (além das inevitáveis suspeitas de corrupção), por que não optar pela não opção?
Exatamente: que tal, se por uma vez, o Estado dissesse: renuncio a uma escolha que sempre será parcial, incompleta e falha, e deixo à sociedade e aos agentes econômicos a liberdade de escolha.
Senhores: façam as suas apostas, o caminho está livre, decidam vocês mesmos, operadores, provedores de programas, fabricantes de aparelhos, que tecnologia querem seguir e sejam livres em seus respectivos empreendimentos. O Estado não adotará nenhum padrão: a sociedade e o mercado o farão, em total liberdade, pois a concorrência aberta sempre foi o melhor dos sistemas econômicos. E que vença o melhor... (Depois de alguma confusão, o melhor do ponto de vista dos consumidores acabará fatalmente se impondo).”
====================================================
Governo prioriza política industrial, sob protestos de organizações
Em audiência com entidades da sociedade civil, a ministra da Casa Civil, Dilma Rousseff, confirmou que a prioridade nas negociações se concentra na instalação da indústria de semicondutores no Brasil como contrapartida
Organizações contestam postura do governo.
Relegado às altas rodas técnicas de universidades e do Ministério das Comunicações até o ano passado, a definição sobre a formatação do Sistema Brasileiro de TV Digital (SBTVD) vem se aproximando de um momento crucial: a escolha do padrão tecnológico.
A proximidade da data vem acirrando a disputa entre radiodifusores, empresas de telecomunicações e tecnologias estrangeiras e dentro do governo. O objeto da briga é o modelo de TV brasileiro, que chega a mais de 90% dos lares do país, e é cobiçado tanto pelo seu potencial de mercado quanto pela sua importância política na formação da opinião de ampla parcela da população.
Por fora da briga de cachorros grandes, que envolve um cercado de R$ 100 bilhões nos próximos 15 anos, movimentos sociais, entidades representativas e organizações que lutam por uma comunicação democrática buscam o adiamento de qualquer decisão neste momento e querem a ampliação do debate para o conjunto da sociedade.
Apesar da tentativa frustrada de aprovação do padrão tecnológico japonês (ISDB), há um mês, o ministro das Comunicações, Hélio Costa, conseguiu pautar no interior do governo a concepção de que a decisão a ser tomada seria relativa à escolha de um dos padrões tecnológicos de outro país para o SBTVD, ignorando totalmente as pesquisas produzidas no país que possibilitariam uma tecnologia majoritariamente brasileira.
O processo passou a ser conduzido pela ministra da Casa Civil, Dilma Rousseff, que se reuniu com os diversos atores na disputa, principalmente os representantes de padrões estrangeiros.
A discussão evoluiu para uma negociação com os japoneses e europeus pelas melhores vantagens e teve o foco direcionado para contrapartidas destes padrões no plano da política industrial.
Fontes do setor consultadas pela Carta Maior acreditam que as notícias sobre a definição em favor dos japoneses tenham procedência. Matéria publicada no jornal “Folha de SP” nesta quarta-feira (08) deu como certa esta decisão.
Segundo a reportagem, a escolha do ISDB se justificaria pela oferta dos japoneses de investir US$ 2 bilhões em uma fábrica de semicondutores no país e pelo forte lobby das emissoras de TV em ano de eleições. Mas no mesmo dia o presidente Lula negou, em Londres, que já tenha sido tomada qualquer decisão.
A análise feita por pessoas próximas ao processo de negociação é que a matéria, supostamente plantada, teria bastante fundamento, mas que o governo fez que não era com ele por que ainda tem esperança de receber nova proposta dos europeus e forçar mais a negociação.
Em audiência realizada com entidades da sociedade civil nesta quarta-feira (8), a ministra Dilma enfatizou que o objetivo central do governo é conseguir trazer uma fábrica de semicondutores (chips), sem a qual o país aprofundaria uma posição periférica na economia global, aumentaria o déficit na balança comercial e "perderia a guerra".
Segundo Edison Lima, do Sindicato dos Pesquisadores em Ciência em Tecnologia de São Paulo, hoje os eletrônicos são o item mais deficitário da balança comercial brasileira, com resultado negativo de US$ 7 bilhões ao ano.
"Desta parcela, cerca de US$ 3 bi são referentes a semicondutores importados, o triplo do que o país exporta por ano em aviões, para fazer uma comparação", diz.
Na avaliação da ministra, todo o resto das definições - desde o modelo de exploração dos serviços e um novo marco regulatório até as regras de transição – seria feito em momento posterior.
Na audiência, os integrantes de organizações da sociedade civil questionaram a ministra sobre como a sociedade seria ouvida nesta discussão, uma vez que a negociação em curso já envolve a definição do padrão tecnológico, amarrando determinadas definições sobre o modelo. Dilma Rousseff respondeu afirmando que a negociação não será pública, que pode não ter conclusão no dia 10 (sexta-feira) e que importa pouco, do ponto de vista do modelo, o padrão escolhido, uma vez que as tecnologias tendem a convergir em um curto espaço de tempo, e todas teriam demonstrado disponibilidade em incorporar soluções nacionais. O diferencial seria quem poderia oferecer a fábrica de semicondutores.
Mas a avaliação de alguns presentes na reunião é que pesou forte o lobby dos radiodifusores e o medo do governo de tê-los, se não como aliados, pelo menos não como inimigos até outubro.
"O governo não pode tratar esta decisão, que tem relevância para a nação e para o conjunto da sociedade e pode alterar o cenário concentrado da mídia brasileira, sob o ponto de vista do pragmatismo eleitoral", critica Diogo Moysés, do Intervozes.
O medo dos integrantes das organizações da sociedade civil é que a alegação das vantagens oferecidas pelos japoneses seja apenas um argumento para justificar a adoção do padrão tecnológico historicamente defendido pela Rede Globo.
A preocupação ganha fundamento pelo fato de os japoneses ainda não terem assegurado os investimentos na fábrica de semicondutores, diferente do que diz a reportagem do jornal Folha de São Paulo, e condicionarem esta oferta a uma análise e viabilidade de mercado e de modelo, conforme reportagem do jornalista Samuel Possebom publicada nesta quinta-feira no portal Tela Viva.
A vigorar esta exigência dos japoneses, o desenho do modelo de negócios e de exploração dos serviços do SBTVD teria de ser definido agora para garantir a montagem da fábrica para o Brasil, amarrando as definições sobre modelo de negócios e serviços, essenciais no SBTVD, segundo Celso Schröder, do Fórum Nacional pela Democratização da Comunicação.
"Não é na política industrial que está contido o desenho da nova cadeia de valor, que advirá da convergência, muito menos seu modelo de serviços e negócios, que deveriam ser os pontos-chaves da política do SBTVD".
Segundo integrantes das organizações, neste novo cenário, a política industrial conteria, sim, o desenho dos outros modelos e o governo passaria então a definir a parte essencial do SBTVD de forma não pública e sem ampla discussão com a sociedade, demonstrando mais uma vez o equívoco na condução do processo e a opção de privilegiar os interesses dos radiodifusores em detrimento da sociedade.
Esse quadro confirmaria a advertência contida na carta entregue pelas entidades à ministra Dilma Roussef, de que estaria em curso uma tentativa de "criar fatos consumados que terminem impedindo a realização de uma das maiores potencialidades da digitalização da TV aberta: a multiplicação do número de canais de televisão e a inclusão digital da população".
A posição foi endossada pela deputada Jandira Feghali (PCdoB-RJ), também presente à reunião. "A discussão de política industrial tem que ser feita junto com o modelo de exploração para evitar um fato consumado", disse.
Debate aberto
Para evitar a política de fato consumado as organizações da sociedade civil foram solicitar a ministra Dilma Roussef o adiamento da decisão e abertura de amplo debate com a sociedade. Estiveram presentes representantes da CUT, da Associação Brasileira de ONGs (Abong), do Intervozes - Coletivo Brasil de Comunicação Social, da Associação Brasileira de Canais Comunitários (ABCCOM), do Fórum Nacional pela Democratização da Comunicação (FNDC), da Articulação Nacional pelo Direito à Comunicação (Cris Brasil) e do Congresso Brasileiro de Cinema (CBC).
"Com a TV digital, será possível abrir a radiodifusão para novas operações como pequenas emissoras comerciais de âmbito local, canais legislativos, comunitários, universitários, públicos e até mesmo produzidos pelos próprios movimentos sociais. Esta decisão terá enormes impactos sociais, culturais e econômicos na vida brasileira e, por isso mesmo, necessita ser fruto de amplo debate", diz a carta entregue.
Os integrantes questionaram a ministra sobre a definição da exploração dos serviços e como a TV Digital poderia contribuir para a democratização da comunicação, permitindo a entrada de novos atores no espectro eletromagnético.
Outra preocupação manifestada pelos presentes foi a dispensa da tecnologia nacional produzida pelas universidades brasileiras.
"O Brasil investiu tempo, dinheiro e obteve ótimos resultados nas pesquisas que produziu. É importante saber se isso será considerado e como acontecerá, pois corremos o risco de colocar inovações que avançam frente à consagradas tecnologias na lata de lixo", questiona Edison Lima.
A posição do governo começa a revoltar também os pesquisadores.
"Vemos encoberta a discussão de áreas em que o Brasil pode de fato alavancar suas indústrias e criar um diferencial de qualidade, que é o caso do software e da geração de conteúdo, áreas que estão intimamente ligadas. Enganam-se aqueles que pensam que a adoção de um padrão estrangeiro não afetará o desenvolvimento de conteúdos", afirma texto escrito por Luis Fernando Soares e Guido Lemos, coordenadores de um dos consórcios brasileiros que produziu inovações tecnológicas.
Na avaliação de José Zunga, presidente da Federação Interestadual dos Trabalhadores em Telecomunicações (Fittel), outro ponto-chave que está sendo solapado no processo é a definição de regras que preparem a implantação da TV Digital no país. "É importante o cuidado com o ambiente regulatório frágil na área das comunicações, pois a criação de um novo serviço pode aumentar o fosso da desigualdade entre grandes e pequenos produtores caso não seja regulada sob a ótica da sociedade".
Também preocupada com isso, a deputada Jandira aproveitou a audiência realizada com a ministra Dilma Roussef para destacar a importância da implantação da TV digital ser feita segundo um marco regulatório democraticamente discutido. Ela informou que a Câmara dos Deputados prepara um seminário ainda para este mês e questionou a ministra sobre quando o governo passaria a incorporar o Parlamento no processo de decisão sobre os rumos do SBTVD.
A ministra reiterou a posição de que o marco regulatório ficaria para depois, mantendo impasse com a posição das entidades. Ao final da reunião, as entidades cobraram que o governo defina concretamente como vai incorporar a sociedade civil no debate. A ministra prometeu uma resposta, mas manteve a posição de que a discussão neste momento ficará restrita ao governo.
(Carta Maior, 9/3)
Figura em primeiro lugar mensagem que eu mandei para esse jornal, seguida de matéria transcrita da Agência Carta Maior:
Leitor opina sobre o processo de escolha do padrão de TV digital
Que tal, se por uma vez, o Estado dissesse: renuncio a uma escolha que sempre será parcial, incompleta e falha, e deixo à sociedade e aos agentes econômicos a liberdade de escolha
Mensagem de Paulo Roberto de Almeida, sociólogo (pralmeida@mac.com e http://www.pralmeida.org):
“Perguntar não ofende: Se é para defender a soberania nacional e os interesses ditos populares na definição de um padrão para a TV digital no Brasil, e se a definição por algum dos existentes, ou mesmo a de um novo, híbrido, como defendem alguns, sempre se dará em detrimento de uma série de vantagens (ou desvantagens) inevitavelmente associadas a qualquer um deles, por que não optar pelo óbvio, pelo mais simples, pelo que dá a maior liberdade possível a todos e a cada um, por que não optar por um que desobrigue o Estado de ter de fazer uma dolorosa e dubitável escolha, que sempre será acusada de parcial e leviana (além das inevitáveis suspeitas de corrupção), por que não optar pela não opção?
Exatamente: que tal, se por uma vez, o Estado dissesse: renuncio a uma escolha que sempre será parcial, incompleta e falha, e deixo à sociedade e aos agentes econômicos a liberdade de escolha.
Senhores: façam as suas apostas, o caminho está livre, decidam vocês mesmos, operadores, provedores de programas, fabricantes de aparelhos, que tecnologia querem seguir e sejam livres em seus respectivos empreendimentos. O Estado não adotará nenhum padrão: a sociedade e o mercado o farão, em total liberdade, pois a concorrência aberta sempre foi o melhor dos sistemas econômicos. E que vença o melhor... (Depois de alguma confusão, o melhor do ponto de vista dos consumidores acabará fatalmente se impondo).”
====================================================
Governo prioriza política industrial, sob protestos de organizações
Em audiência com entidades da sociedade civil, a ministra da Casa Civil, Dilma Rousseff, confirmou que a prioridade nas negociações se concentra na instalação da indústria de semicondutores no Brasil como contrapartida
Organizações contestam postura do governo.
Relegado às altas rodas técnicas de universidades e do Ministério das Comunicações até o ano passado, a definição sobre a formatação do Sistema Brasileiro de TV Digital (SBTVD) vem se aproximando de um momento crucial: a escolha do padrão tecnológico.
A proximidade da data vem acirrando a disputa entre radiodifusores, empresas de telecomunicações e tecnologias estrangeiras e dentro do governo. O objeto da briga é o modelo de TV brasileiro, que chega a mais de 90% dos lares do país, e é cobiçado tanto pelo seu potencial de mercado quanto pela sua importância política na formação da opinião de ampla parcela da população.
Por fora da briga de cachorros grandes, que envolve um cercado de R$ 100 bilhões nos próximos 15 anos, movimentos sociais, entidades representativas e organizações que lutam por uma comunicação democrática buscam o adiamento de qualquer decisão neste momento e querem a ampliação do debate para o conjunto da sociedade.
Apesar da tentativa frustrada de aprovação do padrão tecnológico japonês (ISDB), há um mês, o ministro das Comunicações, Hélio Costa, conseguiu pautar no interior do governo a concepção de que a decisão a ser tomada seria relativa à escolha de um dos padrões tecnológicos de outro país para o SBTVD, ignorando totalmente as pesquisas produzidas no país que possibilitariam uma tecnologia majoritariamente brasileira.
O processo passou a ser conduzido pela ministra da Casa Civil, Dilma Rousseff, que se reuniu com os diversos atores na disputa, principalmente os representantes de padrões estrangeiros.
A discussão evoluiu para uma negociação com os japoneses e europeus pelas melhores vantagens e teve o foco direcionado para contrapartidas destes padrões no plano da política industrial.
Fontes do setor consultadas pela Carta Maior acreditam que as notícias sobre a definição em favor dos japoneses tenham procedência. Matéria publicada no jornal “Folha de SP” nesta quarta-feira (08) deu como certa esta decisão.
Segundo a reportagem, a escolha do ISDB se justificaria pela oferta dos japoneses de investir US$ 2 bilhões em uma fábrica de semicondutores no país e pelo forte lobby das emissoras de TV em ano de eleições. Mas no mesmo dia o presidente Lula negou, em Londres, que já tenha sido tomada qualquer decisão.
A análise feita por pessoas próximas ao processo de negociação é que a matéria, supostamente plantada, teria bastante fundamento, mas que o governo fez que não era com ele por que ainda tem esperança de receber nova proposta dos europeus e forçar mais a negociação.
Em audiência realizada com entidades da sociedade civil nesta quarta-feira (8), a ministra Dilma enfatizou que o objetivo central do governo é conseguir trazer uma fábrica de semicondutores (chips), sem a qual o país aprofundaria uma posição periférica na economia global, aumentaria o déficit na balança comercial e "perderia a guerra".
Segundo Edison Lima, do Sindicato dos Pesquisadores em Ciência em Tecnologia de São Paulo, hoje os eletrônicos são o item mais deficitário da balança comercial brasileira, com resultado negativo de US$ 7 bilhões ao ano.
"Desta parcela, cerca de US$ 3 bi são referentes a semicondutores importados, o triplo do que o país exporta por ano em aviões, para fazer uma comparação", diz.
Na avaliação da ministra, todo o resto das definições - desde o modelo de exploração dos serviços e um novo marco regulatório até as regras de transição – seria feito em momento posterior.
Na audiência, os integrantes de organizações da sociedade civil questionaram a ministra sobre como a sociedade seria ouvida nesta discussão, uma vez que a negociação em curso já envolve a definição do padrão tecnológico, amarrando determinadas definições sobre o modelo. Dilma Rousseff respondeu afirmando que a negociação não será pública, que pode não ter conclusão no dia 10 (sexta-feira) e que importa pouco, do ponto de vista do modelo, o padrão escolhido, uma vez que as tecnologias tendem a convergir em um curto espaço de tempo, e todas teriam demonstrado disponibilidade em incorporar soluções nacionais. O diferencial seria quem poderia oferecer a fábrica de semicondutores.
Mas a avaliação de alguns presentes na reunião é que pesou forte o lobby dos radiodifusores e o medo do governo de tê-los, se não como aliados, pelo menos não como inimigos até outubro.
"O governo não pode tratar esta decisão, que tem relevância para a nação e para o conjunto da sociedade e pode alterar o cenário concentrado da mídia brasileira, sob o ponto de vista do pragmatismo eleitoral", critica Diogo Moysés, do Intervozes.
O medo dos integrantes das organizações da sociedade civil é que a alegação das vantagens oferecidas pelos japoneses seja apenas um argumento para justificar a adoção do padrão tecnológico historicamente defendido pela Rede Globo.
A preocupação ganha fundamento pelo fato de os japoneses ainda não terem assegurado os investimentos na fábrica de semicondutores, diferente do que diz a reportagem do jornal Folha de São Paulo, e condicionarem esta oferta a uma análise e viabilidade de mercado e de modelo, conforme reportagem do jornalista Samuel Possebom publicada nesta quinta-feira no portal Tela Viva.
A vigorar esta exigência dos japoneses, o desenho do modelo de negócios e de exploração dos serviços do SBTVD teria de ser definido agora para garantir a montagem da fábrica para o Brasil, amarrando as definições sobre modelo de negócios e serviços, essenciais no SBTVD, segundo Celso Schröder, do Fórum Nacional pela Democratização da Comunicação.
"Não é na política industrial que está contido o desenho da nova cadeia de valor, que advirá da convergência, muito menos seu modelo de serviços e negócios, que deveriam ser os pontos-chaves da política do SBTVD".
Segundo integrantes das organizações, neste novo cenário, a política industrial conteria, sim, o desenho dos outros modelos e o governo passaria então a definir a parte essencial do SBTVD de forma não pública e sem ampla discussão com a sociedade, demonstrando mais uma vez o equívoco na condução do processo e a opção de privilegiar os interesses dos radiodifusores em detrimento da sociedade.
Esse quadro confirmaria a advertência contida na carta entregue pelas entidades à ministra Dilma Roussef, de que estaria em curso uma tentativa de "criar fatos consumados que terminem impedindo a realização de uma das maiores potencialidades da digitalização da TV aberta: a multiplicação do número de canais de televisão e a inclusão digital da população".
A posição foi endossada pela deputada Jandira Feghali (PCdoB-RJ), também presente à reunião. "A discussão de política industrial tem que ser feita junto com o modelo de exploração para evitar um fato consumado", disse.
Debate aberto
Para evitar a política de fato consumado as organizações da sociedade civil foram solicitar a ministra Dilma Roussef o adiamento da decisão e abertura de amplo debate com a sociedade. Estiveram presentes representantes da CUT, da Associação Brasileira de ONGs (Abong), do Intervozes - Coletivo Brasil de Comunicação Social, da Associação Brasileira de Canais Comunitários (ABCCOM), do Fórum Nacional pela Democratização da Comunicação (FNDC), da Articulação Nacional pelo Direito à Comunicação (Cris Brasil) e do Congresso Brasileiro de Cinema (CBC).
"Com a TV digital, será possível abrir a radiodifusão para novas operações como pequenas emissoras comerciais de âmbito local, canais legislativos, comunitários, universitários, públicos e até mesmo produzidos pelos próprios movimentos sociais. Esta decisão terá enormes impactos sociais, culturais e econômicos na vida brasileira e, por isso mesmo, necessita ser fruto de amplo debate", diz a carta entregue.
Os integrantes questionaram a ministra sobre a definição da exploração dos serviços e como a TV Digital poderia contribuir para a democratização da comunicação, permitindo a entrada de novos atores no espectro eletromagnético.
Outra preocupação manifestada pelos presentes foi a dispensa da tecnologia nacional produzida pelas universidades brasileiras.
"O Brasil investiu tempo, dinheiro e obteve ótimos resultados nas pesquisas que produziu. É importante saber se isso será considerado e como acontecerá, pois corremos o risco de colocar inovações que avançam frente à consagradas tecnologias na lata de lixo", questiona Edison Lima.
A posição do governo começa a revoltar também os pesquisadores.
"Vemos encoberta a discussão de áreas em que o Brasil pode de fato alavancar suas indústrias e criar um diferencial de qualidade, que é o caso do software e da geração de conteúdo, áreas que estão intimamente ligadas. Enganam-se aqueles que pensam que a adoção de um padrão estrangeiro não afetará o desenvolvimento de conteúdos", afirma texto escrito por Luis Fernando Soares e Guido Lemos, coordenadores de um dos consórcios brasileiros que produziu inovações tecnológicas.
Na avaliação de José Zunga, presidente da Federação Interestadual dos Trabalhadores em Telecomunicações (Fittel), outro ponto-chave que está sendo solapado no processo é a definição de regras que preparem a implantação da TV Digital no país. "É importante o cuidado com o ambiente regulatório frágil na área das comunicações, pois a criação de um novo serviço pode aumentar o fosso da desigualdade entre grandes e pequenos produtores caso não seja regulada sob a ótica da sociedade".
Também preocupada com isso, a deputada Jandira aproveitou a audiência realizada com a ministra Dilma Roussef para destacar a importância da implantação da TV digital ser feita segundo um marco regulatório democraticamente discutido. Ela informou que a Câmara dos Deputados prepara um seminário ainda para este mês e questionou a ministra sobre quando o governo passaria a incorporar o Parlamento no processo de decisão sobre os rumos do SBTVD.
A ministra reiterou a posição de que o marco regulatório ficaria para depois, mantendo impasse com a posição das entidades. Ao final da reunião, as entidades cobraram que o governo defina concretamente como vai incorporar a sociedade civil no debate. A ministra prometeu uma resposta, mas manteve a posição de que a discussão neste momento ficará restrita ao governo.
(Carta Maior, 9/3)